Drawings

A page of Cézanne's sketchbook may hold a face near its edge, a few trees separated by open paper, or figures tried more than once. These marks do not all occupy the same place in the making of a painting. Some are studies of a person, building or artwork; some pursue motifs that recur elsewhere; and a watercolour can be a work complete on its own terms. The drawings give us the changing decisions of an artist looking, selecting and trying again. ^{[1] [2]}

Cézanne worked in graphite, pen and ink, and watercolour, on loose sheets as well as in sketchbooks. The National Gallery of Art's Cézanne sketchbook alone includes landscapes, portraits, copies after sculpture, ornamental studies and bathers. Its individual pages span dates from the late 1870s into the 1890s; the present arrangement is a collection record, not a diary that can be read as a continuous day-by-day sequence. ^[3]

A practice with several purposes

The scale of the paper practice is easy to underestimate beside the canvases. MoMA estimates roughly two thousand surviving drawings and watercolours; its 2021 exhibition assembled more than 250 works. That figure is an estimate of surviving works, not a tally of pages in one collection or proof that every sheet was conceived as an autonomous exhibition piece. Cézanne drew repeatedly, revisiting a narrow repertoire of heads, fruit, bathers, trees and mountain views. Repetition need not mean that each instance is a preparatory step toward a single final painting. ^{[4] [1]}

Drawing gave him ways to encounter very different kinds of subject. He could concentrate a portrait into the turn of a head; search across a panorama for an order of roofs and trees; or copy a sculpture to examine a pose already shaped by another artist. A page may record exploration without resolving it. Research on selected Chicago works shows that graphite, transparent colour and white paper can each carry an image. ^[2]

Kunstmuseum Basel's investigation of its drawings underlines how varied the surviving material is. The museum reported 154 sheets in its collection, including 111 from five dispersed sketchbooks. Those are bounded collection figures. In reconstructing books, conservators examined page size and paper, foliation and remnants of sewing, using different forms of light to test the evidence. A detached page can retain clues to a book while losing its original neighbour. ^[5]

A sheet also changes how a viewer understands Cézanne's familiar subjects. Oil paintings can conceal early lines beneath later colour; on paper, a line may remain visible beside the next decision. That visibility is especially valuable when comparing a sequence of heads or trees, but it is not a transparent record of every action. Marks can be strengthened, crossed, or overlaid. The Art Institute's study of selected watercolours found cumulative additions in the works examined, while its authors carefully limited their material conclusions to that group. A surviving line participates in the present image, though it need not have been laid down first. ^[2]

Portraits made in graphite

In the Washington sketchbook, Madame Cezanne (1888/1891) is a frontal bust whose gathered hair and high neckline emerge against diagonal hatching. Much of the lower sheet remains open. The dense field beside the head makes its outline legible without closing every part of the page. The separate Self-Portrait (c. 1895) isolates the bald head, dark brows, moustache and pointed beard above a long expanse of paper. These are two different responses to the problem of a head's presence on a small sheet. ^{[6] [7]}

The Artist's Son (c. 1887) turns the head into profile. Hatching gathers around the ear and neck while the contour of hair and collar stays comparatively spare. Cézanne also drew pairs of heads: the two faces in Two Heads of Women incline downward, while those in Two Heads (1890/1896) overlap and turn to the right. The titles and positions describe the images; they do not identify every sitter. ^{[8] [9] [10]}

Woman Leaning Forward (1888/1891) compresses the figure into a bowed head and shoulder near the top of the page. The open lower area makes the bent posture more pronounced. It is one of several works carrying the same catalogue title in the book, so the date and accession matter when comparing it with another reproduction. ^[11]

Sketchbooks: pages, sequences and subjects

The Washington volume is catalogued as a sketchbook with many separately titled drawings, rather than as one extra drawing on top of all its pages. Its graphite entries include Study of Houses , Landscape Near Aix-en-Provence , portraits and small studies of plants. A pen and brown ink Two Bathers appears on end papers. The mixture itself tells us something: a portable book could accommodate a fleeting idea, a sustained contour and a copied figure without assigning all three the same destination. ^{[3] [12]}

MoMA’s paper conservator and curators describe a material choice behind the changing scale of the drawings. Cézanne used both smooth wove and ribbed laid papers, drawing in books and on loose sheets, sometimes on both sides. Watermarks identify many mature watercolours as made on semi-absorbent Canson and Montgolfier wove paper. He often divided purchased sheets into halves or quarters, making smaller, more portable surfaces. A watermark identifies the manufacture of paper where it survives; these observations do not assign every undated drawing to that stock or tell us why an individual sheet was cut. The paper’s texture and absorbency also affect how pencil catches and how a wash spreads or holds an edge. ^[4]

The current Cézanne catalogue separates paintings, loose drawings and watercolours, and sketchbooks. It catalogues nineteen sketchbooks; the number describes that catalogue's books, not the total number of sheets Cézanne ever used or a claim that every book survives intact. Some pages have been detached, and present ownership can separate parts of what was once a working sequence. The Basel reconstruction therefore offers a useful check on the temptation to read a digital list as Cézanne's own order. ^{[13] [5]}

Learning by copying

Copying was one use for the sketchbook. In Washington's Study of “Venus de Milo” , Cézanne chooses contours and internal divisions to make a sculpted body's turn legible on paper. Study of Puget's “Hercules Resting” gives him a different distribution of weight; Study of a Decorative Ornament shifts attention from a whole figure to a designed detail. These pages show looking at earlier art through line, without establishing a direct route to a particular oil. The Musée Granet guide records his enrolment in Aix's free drawing school in 1857 and his first Paris visit, including the Louvre, in 1861. That context helps explain copying as sustained study rather than a substitute for viewing the sculptures themselves. ^{[14] [15] [16] [17]}

A book also changes the relationship between image and page. The drawing is not only a subject detached for display: a fold may divide a view, a margin may hold writing, and an end paper may offer an unexpected drawing surface. Modern reproductions often rotate or crop a sheet to make the motif easier to see. That helps with the figure but can hide evidence of how the mark occupied the original book. In the Washington records, the Madame Cezanne and Self-Portrait pages are presented as individual objects, while the larger book remains a separate aggregate catalogue entry. It is useful to move between those two views rather than count the aggregate as another sheet. ^{[3] [6] [7]}

The same book moves among observed and invented configurations. Study for “The Judgement of Paris” or “The Amorous Shepherd” packs several figures into an animated, crowded arrangement. The catalogue title names possible subject relationships; the page itself allows us to see Cézanne trying placements and gestures. Two Bathers places two small ink figures beneath and beside writing on the book's end paper. A recurring bather figure across the oeuvre is a reason to compare works, not proof that this particular page prepared a named canvas. ^{[18] [12]}

Lines across Provence

The long, narrow Landscape Near Aix-en-Provence (1877/1880) opens across a spread. A large building at the right balances low roofs in the centre; a thin upper line carries the eye toward the other side. The book's central fold interrupts the space. Cézanne has made a landscape of relations among distant rooflines and the larger architecture nearby, with very little tonal filling. ^[19]

Study of Houses (1879/1882) asks a related question within another page: how much of a cluster of buildings can be stated by edges and repeated angles? The Plaster Mill (1889/1892) puts the pitched roof, chimney and façade into a denser scheme of hatching and angular framing. The different degrees of finish are visible ways of organising a subject, not a reliable ranking of which scene mattered most to the artist. ^{[20] [21]}

Trees test a different kind of line. In Landscape with Trees (1895/1898), the upper row of rounded crowns is separated from a few branching strokes below. The intervals of bare paper help the groups stay distinct. Marks including “VI” and “11” on the sheet are recorded as later-hand inscriptions, not Cézanne's instructions for reading it. Thistle (1893/1896) similarly concentrates on one plant, its round head and diagonally extending stem leaving a broad part of the sheet free. Here spare paper gives the form room, rather than simply awaiting more pencil. ^{[22] [23]}

These local drawings sit beside a much wider practice of returning to a site. The late watercolours discussed by Geneviève Monnier vary the placement of houses, rocks, woodland and Mont Sainte-Victoire within the paper. She attends to vertical trunks, diagonal rooftops and the way one passage can appear to extend into unpainted space. The arrangement differs by sheet: her selected works do not yield a fixed landscape formula. ^[24]

Watercolour as a work on paper

A watercolour can retain drawn lines while asking colour to construct a separate set of relations. In the Art Institute of Chicago's The Three Skulls (1902–06), graphite establishes parts of the chair rail, drapery and skulls; thin colour enters the recesses and spaces around the bones, and the bright paper contributes to their surfaces. The museum's technical study found that successive washes were allowed to dry before more colour was added in the works it examined. ^[2]

The same study compares that watercolour with the oil Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet (1904). The related subject is handled differently: the paper's open lightness and visible graphite stand beside the oil's more materially described skulls and textiles. It treats many mature still-life watercolours as independent works, even where motifs recur in oils. ^[2]

Monnier's account broadens the view beyond one sheet. In some works she sees colour laid directly onto paper without preliminary pencil; in others pencil is added over washes or participates in a denser network. She describes reserves of unpainted paper as sources of breadth and light. Her comparison between diluted mountain watercolours and strongly coloured, curling marks in portraits of the gardener Vallier also resists a single, steadily thinning late style. ^[24]

The Chicago study also discusses Man Wearing a Straw Hat (1905–06), where pencil defines facial features while patches of colour and unpainted paper describe light and shadow without always respecting those boundaries. Here pencil and wash remain visible at once, while the paper lends luminosity to the face. ^[2]

Monnier notices a further difference in how late subjects sit on a sheet. In some woodland views, repeated verticals make a framework for flickering patches of colour. In certain rocky views, the motif gathers toward one area while corners stay empty. In her account, both arrangements keep structural decisions visible, even as light and colour loosen the boundaries of things. This contrast between a vertical framework and an off-centre rocky motif makes each composition a different problem. ^[24]

Monnier, following Roger Fry and Lionello Venturi, argued that experiments on paper affected Cézanne’s late oils. The claim is a historical interpretation of relationships between media; the physical sequence of any one work has to be established from that work. ^{[24] [25]}

Dating such sheets can be difficult. Monnier warns that watercolour still lifes vary in method and do not form a neat march toward greater openness. A firm date for one identified object cannot therefore be supplied to another on the basis of a similar reserve, parallel hatch or subject. This is especially important for motifs that Cézanne revisited over years. Comparing two watercolours of the same kind of tree can expose a change in emphasis, but it cannot by itself prove a chronological lesson the artist intended to demonstrate. The most useful comparison names the sheets first and describes what each actually does. ^[24]

A recurring motif is a question, not a chain of copies

Bathers were particularly persistent. The Washington Two Bathers is a small ink image on an end paper; the catalogue also records Women Bathers and a Roll of Paper in graphite. The ink figures share end paper with writing, while Women Bathers and a Roll of Paper uses graphite on a separate sheet. Those differences of support and grouping matter when comparing them with Philadelphia’s monumental Large Bathers . Shared subject matter alone does not establish a direct preparatory relationship. ^{[12] [26]}

A more explicit relationship appears in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen's pencil A Smoking Man, study for the painting The Cardplayers . The museum dates it around 1890–92 and records a sheet far larger than a pocket-book page, 508 by 319 millimetres. The figure belongs to the Card Players investigation. The current Cézanne catalogue identifies the same sheet as FWN 1762 but dates it 1892–96. The institutions therefore agree on the object and related motif while offering different ranges; neither label alone establishes the order of the painted versions. ^{[27] [28]}

Portrait heads, plants and buildings likewise return without becoming interchangeable. The Washington Victor Chocquet and an Angel for “The Apotheosis of Delacroix” mixes graphite, pen and brown ink, and watercolour on one sheet. It makes especially clear that “drawing” names a field of decisions, not one material. The catalogue's careful medium description gives a better account of that page than the common shorthand “pencil sketch.” ^[29]

How to look at a sheet

Start by locating the marks that carry structure: a contour at the side of a head, a roofline, a branch or a line of writing. Then notice where pressure grows darker and where the paper remains exposed. On Landscape Near Aix-en-Provence , the book's fold is part of what survives; on Landscape with Trees , later inscriptions should be kept separate from the artist's marks. In a watercolour, ask whether line and wash reinforce the same edge or offer slightly different readings of a form. ^{[19] [22] [2]}

Finally, check the identity of the sheet. Several sketchbook pages share titles, and an upright cropped gallery image may suppress the margin or orientation of an open book. Exact accession, medium and date distinguish the page you are seeing from its neighbours. These sixteen Washington sketchbook drawings offer a selected view of Cézanne’s works on paper. Each page can be read for what its marks accomplish, from a barely stated contour to closely pressed hatching. ^[3]

Explore the drawings

Read the portraits together— Madame Cezanne , Self-Portrait and The Artist's Son —to compare a frontal bust, an isolated head and a profile. ^{[6] [7] [8]}

The landscapes and plants shift scale from Landscape with Trees , Study of Houses and Landscape Near Aix-en-Provence to The Plaster Mill and Thistle . ^{[22] [20] [19] [21] [23]}

Figure studies lead through Woman Leaning Forward , Two Heads , Two Heads of Women , Study for “The Judgement of Paris” or “The Amorous Shepherd” and Two Bathers . Copies and decorative observation appear in Study of Puget's “Hercules Resting” , Study of “Venus de Milo” and Study of a Decorative Ornament . ^{[11] [10] [9] [18] [12] [15] [14] [16]}