Unfinished Cézanne sketches discovered on reverse side of paintings

Two unfinished sketches have been discovered on the reverse side of two watercolors by Cezanne – and officials at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation museum said that the collector who bought them more than 90 years ago probably never knew they were there, The Guardian reports.

The Philadelphia-based foundation said the sketches, one graphite and the other watercolour, were found during conservation work on the reverse sides of two Cézanne watercolours depicting the landscape of southern France.


Officials said in a news release that the sketches haven’t been seen since at least the early 20th century, “most likely prior to Dr Albert Barnes’s purchase of the works from Leo Stein in 1921”.


“We’ve had [the watercolours] out of the frame before. But the backs were covered with brown paper,” said Barbara Buckley, the foundation’s senior director of conservation and chief painting conservator, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “That’s one of the reasons they were sent [for conservation]. Brown paper is very acidic, and they needed acid-free paper.”


Officials said Cézanne often worked on both sides of the paper in his sketchbooks and on larger sheets, producing thousands of such drawings over the course of his career, but they were usually done “to experiment with line and colour”.


Buckley said the sketches, which were on the back of watercolours normally on view in one of the galleries, offer a window into Cézanne’s artistic process.


On the back of “The Chaine de l’Etoile Mountains”, conservators found that Cézanne had begun a sketch of trees with pencil and then colour, but the centre of the sketch is so unfinished it’s hard to determine what it represents. On the back of “Trees” conservators found a detailed depiction without colour of houses and the same Etoile range that was often the subject of the artist’s sketches and paintings.


“We had no reason to think there was anything there,” said Buckley, who said nothing was found on the back of another Cézanne watercolour after conservation work in 2007. Barnes officials say 15 unknown Cézanne drawings have been found in the last three decades.