Boîte à lait, carafe et bol

Boîte à lait, carafe et bol (c.1879) at the Hermitage Museum is a characteristic early mature still life from the period when Cézanne was establishing his systematic approach to domestic objects as formal subjects. The milk can, carafe, and bowl offer three quite different material qualities — tin, glass, and ceramic — that require distinct approaches to the color modulation technique he was developing. The Hermitage holding connects this to the great Russian collections of French Post-Impressionist painting assembled by Shchukin and Morozov in the years before the First World War; the Russian collectors were among the most advanced buyers of Post-Impressionist work before French and American institutions fully recognized its significance. The modest everyday objects of the arrangement — kitchen utensils rather than the decorative ginger pots and Delft-blue jars of his more elaborate still lifes — reflects Cézanne's democratic approach to subject matter: formal interest was available in any object of sufficient structural complexity, regardless of its market value.

Each object is rendered through Cézanne's developing method of constructing form through parallel planes of color — the rounded carafe and bowl built up with faceted strokes that suggest volume through the systematic modulation of tone and hue. The white cloth beneath the objects is painted with particular sophistication, its folds analyzed through subtle gradations of grey and cream.