Still Life With Wine Bottle and Lemons 1926

Henri Catargi made this still life with oil paint, but when? The date is unknown, and so the painting stands outside of time, somehow. I’m trying to imagine Catargi in the act of painting these lemons and wine bottle! The tabletop, the background—these feel scrubbed, the paint dragged. There’s a lot of gray, brown and mauve. It's as if the artist is thinking aloud, making adjustments to the composition as they go along, moving the lemons around, maybe drinking from that bottle... The brushwork is so evident and that bottle is teetering! I feel how Catargi is negotiating the surface of the canvas and building up a vision of something solid, like a Cezanne. I can imagine him, or me, working on this over days, smearing and pushing the paint around. I like the idea of the artist having a conversation, across time, with another artist who explored the same subject matter. Painting is just one big, long, slow conversation with other painters!