Small Delft vase with flowers

The Small Delft Vase with Flowers, at the Musée d'Orsay, was painted in 1873 during Cézanne's productive stay in Auvers-sur-Oise under the guidance of Camille Pissarro. The blue-and-white Delftware vessel was a fashionable object in French bourgeois households of the period, and its appearance in Cézanne's work connects his still-life practice to a contemporary taste for Dutch decorative ceramics that was widespread among middle-class collectors. This relatively modest work shows Cézanne still absorbing Impressionist influence — looser in touch than his Aix period paintings — while developing the structural attentiveness that would distinguish his mature still lifes.

Cézanne paints the Delft vase with attention to its blue-and-white pattern, but the overall handling has the freshness of direct observation rather than methodical construction. The flowers are rendered in varied strokes that distinguish individual blooms while allowing them to read as a unified chromatic cluster above the geometric anchor of the vase.