Still Life - Pitcher, Fruit, Red Bottle #2

In the final years of Cady Wells's career, before his untimely death from a heart attack in 1954, he produced a series of still lifes, inspired by those of Paul Cézanne and his mentor Andrew Dasburg. Wells experimented with various stylistic approaches in these still lives. In this arrangement of a tabletop still life, Wells looked to medieval stained glass, examples of which he had studied at Chartres Cathedral in 1952 and 1953. The heavy black contours emulate the leading and tracery of the Gothic windows, and Wells sought a luminosity in his color suggestive of limited palette of medieval glass.