Description
The Peppermint Bottle – the painting that was named last
A dark green bottle with a red label, a tall glass carafe, a small half-filled glass and five apples stand on a table that a large blue patterned cloth covers almost to the floor; a stiff white linen cloth falls across the bottle. The canvas measures 65.9 × 82.1 cm, was made between 1893 and 1895 and is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington (Chester Dale Collection, acc. 1963.10.104). With us the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas, stretched over a solid stretcher frame.
What the dealer wrote down about it
Ambroise Vollard, its first owner, entered the canvas in his stockbooks twice over. The first entry, number 3757, reads: oil, still life, on a table a blue cloth, a napkin, a carafe, a bottle, some fruit – valued at 250 francs. The second entry, number 3814, is shorter still: still life, fruit, blue cloth – this time at 300 francs. The bottle the work is named after today is not mentioned in that second entry at all.
The name that only stuck later
The canvas went through its exhibitions under other titles as well. In 1901 it hung with the Paris Indépendants as Still Life, and in 1907, at the great Cézanne retrospective in the Salon d’Automne, as The Carafe – named, that is, after the glass vessel in the middle rather than the bottle beside it. In Zurich in 1917 it was Still Life again, in New York in 1928 a Large Still Life. Only later did the small bottle on the left give the work the name it carries now.
The blue cloth and a wall that is not empty
The largest thing on the canvas is not a vessel but a fabric. The blue-grey drape with its broad leaves and stripes spills over the edge of the table and takes up the lower third; its folds are painted with exactly the weight given to the apples. Behind it the wall is not empty: a single dark horizontal rail runs across it, and it is that rail which keeps the objects from floating in colour and sets them in a room instead.
The Peppermint Bottle is a cool, blue-green painting with warm accents – the red label, the yellow and red apples, the ochre table leg. It works well in a dining room, a hallway or a study, where a wall wants a calm colour that is not a dull one. The fifteen sizes run from 50 × 40 cm to 180 × 144 cm, and in-between measurements we stretch to custom size. How it will look framed is shown by our 3D preview application. Among our art paintings on canvas it keeps good company with The Kitchen Table, Still Life with a Dessert and Bread and Eggs.
- Subject: The Peppermint Bottle, Paul Cézanne, 1893-1895, National Gallery of Art, Washington (1963.10.104)
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: Vollard’s second stockbook entry leaves the bottle out entirely – the title came last
