Description
Young Italian Woman at a Table – the cloth whose colours the catalogue writes down
A young woman sits at a table, her head tipped and resting on her right hand, the elbow planted on the top. She wears a white blouse with full gathered sleeves; a gold-yellow sash runs over her left shoulder and across her breast, and the right side of the canvas is filled by a dark blue-green skirt. A dark band circles her right wrist; her left hand lies flat on the cloth. The cloth takes the whole lower left third and is the strongest thing in the work: large rosettes and leaf forms in rust-orange, deep green and cream. Behind, a warm red-brown wall. The canvas measures 92 × 73 cm, was made about 1900 and is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is painted from scratch, stroke by stroke: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas, the colour laid in several coats.
Green and rust – the colours the catalogue names
Among its motifs the catalogue raisonné normally lists bare nouns: chair, table, vase, stove. For this canvas it stops and describes instead: two kinds of cloth are recorded, one of them as a fabric with a green and rust floral pattern. For an index to name colours at all is a rarity in this source – and it is exactly that cloth which takes the leading part in the work. The catalogue is pointing at the same thing the eye notices.
Resting on the elbow
The work’s French title, “accoudée”, gives neither a name nor a place but a posture: resting on the elbow. That is precisely what we see – the weight of the head passes to the hand, the hand to the elbow, the elbow to the table. Because the body is propped, the whole left half stays quiet and firm, while the right, with its full sleeve and skirt, stays open.
Everything else is quiet
Apart from the cloth the work is restrained in colour: a red-brown wall, a white blouse, a dark blue-green skirt. The cloth therefore does not merely stand out, it carries the entire colour accent of the canvas – which is why the work reads well on a quieter, single-coloured wall, where its pattern gets no competition. Another canvas where two patterns measure themselves against each other is Madame Cézanne in a Striped Skirt.
Because the canvas is upright, the smallest size begins at 40 × 50 cm and the largest measures 144 × 180 cm. Every intermediate measurement we stretch to custom size, and the framed effect is shown in advance by our 3D rendering application, the canvas edge stays clean. The canvas edge stays clean. Among our reproductions on canvas it is kept company by Woman with a Coffeepot, and among the still lifes by Straw-Trimmed Vase, Sugar Bowl and Apples.
- Subject: Young Italian Woman at a Table, Paul Cézanne, about 1900, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the catalogue writes down the cloth’s colours – green and rust – which it rarely does for other motifs
