Plate 8 Paul Cezanne n The Dessert, a late, exceptional still life later—a piece of fruit on the table? the edge of The Dessert, 1900-1906 Iin watercolors, the space that is so often a curtain? the edge of another counter surface?— Watercolor and implied beyond the frame of Cezanne's still lifes there is the hallucination of a sort of profile: graphite on white paper, is actually glimpsed around the corner of a a bit of a nose and nostril, an eye, even an ear 47 x 61 cm (iSVz x 24 in.) wall and the far edge of the expansive table, with (just to the right of the curtain of watercolor and Private collection its compotier and flute glass, the same one that beneath the beginnings of the wavy-lipped sits waiting in Still Life with Apples and Chair plate). A figment of the studio imagination, this Back (pi. 7). That space might be the kitchen or spectral profile signals the watercolor's state a surface in the studio improvised for food of incompletion and its experimental thinking, not preparation and presentation. In among the hasty, to mention the human absences that animate it. partial indications of things to be fleshed out 39 THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS