Bowl and Milk-Jug

Bowl and Milk-Jug, painted around 1875, belongs to Cézanne's first sustained phase of still-life exploration after his Auvers period with Pissarro had lightened his palette and made his approach more systematic. He was by this point settled in his Aix-en-Provence routine, working in the family estate at Jas de Bouffan and in the city's surroundings, with periodic visits to Paris. The bowl and milk-jug were among the most modest of domestic objects — utilitarian ceramics with no decorative pretension — and their inclusion as serious subjects for painting reflected Cézanne's conviction that the formal interest of an object had nothing to do with its social value. Chardin had pioneered this democratic approach to still-life objects in the eighteenth century, and Cézanne's conscious debt to the earlier French master was significant. The Artizon Museum in Tokyo, with its extraordinary range of French nineteenth-century painting, places this modest early canvas in the company of more ambitious works while preserving the sense of its self-contained, concentrated formal purpose.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.