Detail 16 scansion and up-close inspection of different bare white paper, and its lack of concentrated ways of working, snarled and reinforced pigment or dense complication, it is easier at the center, diaphanously veiled at the out- to see through one layer to the next, from the skirts. We shall begin with the latter, and palest of rose to a wash of blue to a slightly, move back in through the forest of tapestried but only slightly, denser accumulation of dun taches, or patches, at the boundary of the green, not necessarily in that order. (It is a central arrangement of objects, and in from pool of the same dun green that seems to there to the composition's node, the blue pot have escaped its bounds to lie stranded at the that is both starting and culminating point, bottom left edge of the white linen, perhaps that is layered with invisible graphite and initially in an effort to balance the pale green gradations of blue running from thin to thick, with the brilliantly multicolored with the bare translucent to opaque, from watery binder white areas of the composition.) Also avail- to richly pigmented mineral deposit, the able to the eye here as nowhere else in the two constitutive elements of the watercolor still life is the characteristic watercolor medium. "handwriting" of Cezanne, the way he feath- In the watercolor's northern suburbs ered the watery pigment out from its original we find the shallowest, most diluted of pool in thinner, fingerlike strokes that simu- its districts, the band of translucent brown late the hatch marks of his drawing (not and green above the line of the uppermost to mention the diagonally laid "constructive course of the wainscoting (detail 16). There strokes" of his oil painting) while amor- Cezanne's unusual manner of working phously evoking the very hand and even the in watercolor—laying down a patch of thin, brush (es) with which he worked (detail ij). relatively unmixed color, allowing it to dry, In the ribbon that divides the upper and then layering over it other patches, often region of wall from the lower (this skyline is stroked in different directions, of other col- the largest threshold on the sheet of paper, ors, similarly thin, and similarly pure—can be a kind of frame within a frame), we can see parsed by the eye with relative ease. Because the complementary way in which Cezanne of the openness of this strip, its aeration by worked with macroboundaries and large Overleaf: detail 17 109 PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS