Skull

Paul Cézanne's Skull (1885) is one of his several vanitas-inflected still life studies featuring a human skull — a subject with deep roots in European art from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish vanitas paintings. Cézanne's skulls are not conventional memento mori but rather subjects for his formal investigation: the skull's spherical and elliptical forms, its specific surface texture, the play of light across its rounded surfaces — all of interest to the painter for the same formal reasons he investigated apples and pottery. Yet the skull's associations with mortality inevitably infuse even the most formal approach.

Cézanne renders the skull through his characteristic constructive method: the rounded cranium built through curved directional strokes, the orbital cavities and cheekbones described as geometric masses, the jaw's simpler forms organized within the overall composition. His palette for the skull is necessarily restricted — the warm cream-yellow of aged bone, the grey shadows in cavities, the warm ground behind — but within this restriction he achieves considerable chromatic subtlety through careful modulation.