The modern sense of colour and the touch of the brush is applied to timeless scenes in this small group of genre paintings, evoking more complex themes than the mere portrayal of daily life, albeit never explicitly.

When Lionello Venturi included Paul Cézanne’s watercolour from the Cerruti Collection in the first catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, he did not know the painting - La Fontaine (The Fountain) (fig. 1) - that this watercolour was a preparatory study for, despite it belonging to the collection of Charles Loeser, and then conserved in Florence. Loeser was not very inclined to make his paintings public and only some of them appear in Venturi’s catalogue. After his death in 1928, his widow continued to uphold the same high level of privacy,¹ refusing to provide scholars with any photographs of the paintings in the collection, so that Venturi was only able to list a few of them in the general catalogue of 1936. An undated sheet in Venturi’s hand contains a list of paintings by Cézanne in the Loeser Collection: The Fountain could be the painting described as a “Very small composition”² When the little painting was put up for auction at Sotheby’s on 6 May 1959, Venturi, who was consulted prior to the sale, asked for permission to see it in person and,³ having resolved any doubts, added it to the second edition of the catalogue (never published). The typewritten entry associates it with the Cerruti watercolour.⁴ Adrien Chappuis published a sheet with two studies for the male figure of the beggar in the middle of the composition and one for the cow behind him in the catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s drawings,⁵ but failed to observe the link between the two watercolour versions and the oil painting of The Fountain. It has therefore only been possible to piece together the history of this work relatively recently.⁶ Cézanne had set down certain aspects in pencil and produced a very detailed watercolour study of it, as he often did for works of this kind.⁷ He then went on to translate it into a small painting, only a little bigger than the watercolour. On the left-hand side of the composition we can see two women at the fountain: one is filling a jug with water, the other is turned towards the viewer. In the centre is the old beggar, with his legs bent, receiving charity from a boy accompanied by his dog. Behind the old man we can see a path and the outline of a cow. On the right-hand side, in the foreground, is another cow, The only significant difference between the watercolour and the painting is the presence of a third woman in the group on the left in the oil painting. The watercolour, more so than the oil version, reveals the presence of separate regular brushstrokes, particularly in the foliage of the trees. The paint is applied in small touches, not dissimilar from the so-called “constructive brushstroke” used by the artist between the second half of the 1870s and the 1880s. This latter characteristic, combined with the atmospheric colouring, has led to the work being dated to just after the mid- 1870s, the period when Cézanne’s work was closest to Impressionism. However, the watercolour is not the transcription of a lighting effect observed from life, but an imagined and unseen “genre scene”,⁸ a sketch of life in the fields that perhaps conceals an allegorical meaning and forms part of a little group of small pieces produced during this phase, in which the colouring is light, but the subject matter is invented. The pose of the old man, rotated by half a turn, replicates that of the peasant on the right in La Vie des champs (1876-77),⁹ another painting belonging to the above-mentioned group, which also features a woman holding a jug of water. This latter theme in La Vie des champs is associated with the Samaritan woman at the well, which features in a recently discovered drawing by Cézanne from the late 1860s.¹⁰ The modern sense of colour and the touch of the brush is applied to timeless scenes in this small group of genre paintings, evoking more complex themes than the mere portrayal of daily life, albeit never explicitly. In this regard it is striking to see Venturi’s hurried note from 1935,¹¹ written after visiting Gaston Bernheim (one of the owners of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune) and seeing the Cerruti Collection watercolour, a beautiful engraving of which was subsequently produced by Aldo Garosci (also exiled in Paris and Venturi’s assistant on the catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s work) to accompany the entry for the painting, conserved in the Archivio di Lionello Venturi: “Legend, like a scene of the Samaritan woman at the well. Interesting genre scene. Image of the herdsman leaning over towards the child. I would say 1878-80. Green and blue predominant, with a few touches of yellow in the fountain. Blue sky. Calm colouring (L.V. 35).”¹²

Claudio Zambianchi

¹Rewald 1989, p. 82, no. 3.

²“La Sapienza” Università degli Studi di Roma, Archivio di Lionello Venturi, Cézanne Series, Envelope 10, File 104.

³See the correspondence between Sotheby’s and L. Venturi, replies dated 18 and 24 March 1959 (“La Sapienza” Università degli Studi di Roma, Archivio di Lionello Venturi, Cézanne Series, Envelope 10, file 106).

⁴See entries 276 and 980 (“La Sapienza” Università degli Studi di Roma, Archivio di Lionello Venturi, Cézanne Series, Envelope 16, Reply Files 143 and 146).

⁵Chappuis 1973, vol. I, p. 78, vol. II, no. 134, ill.

⁶Rewald 1983, p. 96.

⁷Id. 1996, p. 192.

⁸Venturi 1936, p. 247.

⁹W. Feilchenfeldt, J. Warman, D. Nash, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne, www.cezannecatalogue. com/catalogue/index.php, no. 641 (accessed 2 December 2018).

¹⁰Chedeville 2017.

¹¹“La Sapienza” Università degli Studi di Roma, Archivio di Lionello Venturi, Cézanne Series, Envelope 6, file 63.

¹²Ibid., Envelope 3, file 32.