Description
The Garden at Les Lauves – the canvas where the priming shows
The lower third is taken up by a low wall, painted in a few ochre and green strokes. Above it a band of green opens out – trees, scrub, perhaps gardens – in green, blue and brownish patches that never close into outlines. At the top is the sky, in patches too. Between the strokes the grey priming of the canvas itself shows through in places. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s late work of about 1906, which measures 65.5 × 81.3 centimetres in the original and is held by the Phillips Collection in Washington under the number 0286.
A grey priming left visible
The catalogue raisonné names, among the technical headings for this canvas, the grey priming. That is not a note for conservators but something that decides how the work looks: the paint is not carried across the whole surface but set down in separate strokes, between which the greyish ground of the canvas stays uncovered. So the work does not read as a finished surface but as a mesh of touches of colour laid on a light ground. It is that grey which binds everything together: the green of the trees and the blue of the sky do not meet directly but across it.
Two headings for a whole canvas
What is striking is how little the catalogue lists for this work at all. Among the motifs it names one single thing – the wall – and among the technical headings one single term, the grey priming. No trees, no house, no place among the locales. That is not a gap in the record but a description of a state: on the canvas, apart from the wall, there is no object that could be named with certainty. Everything else is colour that has not yet closed into a thing.
Four owners
The provenance is short. At the painter’s death in 1906 the canvas stayed in his estate. On 11 March 1907 Ambroise Vollard and the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris took it jointly. After them we find it with the Wildenstein galleries in New York, and in 1955 the Phillips Collection in Washington bought it, where it remains. Between the painter’s death and the museum stand only two dealers’ names.
A price written as a range
In Vollard’s second stockbook the canvas carries the number 4474 and a description of four words: paysage. village temps orage – landscape, village, stormy weather. Beside it stands not a price but a range: 2,500 to 5,000 francs. The entry therefore says not what the work was worth but between which two sums the dealer was prepared to bargain – a rarity in this source.
Shown as a “recent purchase”
In April and May 1948 the canvas was in New York at Wildenstein’s in Six Masters of Post-Impressionism as number 11, and the catalogue notes that an anonymous owner lent it. In 1951 it was at the Cincinnati Museum of Art as number 2. In 1955, the year of the purchase, it appears at the Phillips Collection in an exhibition named after another painter – Maurice Sterne: Retrospective and Recent Purchases – where it was shown among the recent acquisitions. In October 1977 it was at MoMA in New York in Cézanne: The Late Work as number 55 with plate 79, from where it travelled to Houston and the Grand Palais.
Les Lauves in the catalogue
The same place recurs in the catalogue several times, but in other media. Beside this oil canvas there are recorded the watercolour Le Jardin des Lauves of 40 × 54 centimetres, the sheet La Terrasse du jardin des Lauves of 33 × 47 centimetres, and La Cathédrale d’Aix vue de l’atelier des Lauves of 31.8 × 47 centimetres. That last title names the studio at Les Lauves – and it is from the titles, not from a biography, that we know the place was a working place for the painter.
Because the canvas is light, airy and without sharp outlines, it works as a surface of colour rather than as a scene; it suits a room where the work is meant to bring light rather than a story. We offer fifteen sizes, from 50 × 40 to 180 × 144 centimetres, all measurements in centimetres; anything in between we stretch to measure, and how it stands on the wall is shown in advance by our 3D application. From the same late years come Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir, Seated Man and The Red Rock.
- Subject: The Garden at Les Lauves, Paul Cézanne, about 1906, Phillips Collection, Washington
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the catalogue names, among the technical headings for this canvas, the grey priming left visible between the strokes
