Three Skulls on an Oriental Carpet

Three Skulls on an Oriental Carpet at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, painted around 1904, intensifies the memento mori tradition of vanitas still life with an almost theatrical accumulation. Cézanne painted skulls repeatedly in his late career — a single skull was a standard studio prop that appeared in several works — but the three skulls arranged together on a richly patterned carpet creates a more elaborate confrontation with mortality than his other skull paintings. Painted in the final years of his life, with his own death from pleurisy coming in 1906, these late skull paintings have an obvious biographical resonance.

The three skulls present contrasting formal problems — their smooth, rounded surfaces requiring the same systematic plane analysis Cézanne applies to apples. The patterned oriental carpet beneath provides a colorful counterpoint to the bleached white of the bone forms above, the decorative complexity of the textile contrasting with the stark simplicity of the skulls.