The delicately drawn flowers and leaves in this sketch seem to float so lightly across the page that the subject might appear at first to be a landscape. It is more likely a corner of a tall chair back embroidered with a floral pattern, the same chair that appears in some of Cézanne's portraits of his wife in the early 1890s (Venturi, Lionello.
Cézanne, son art--son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris, 1936, nos. 570-72). But the same pattern also appears in another drawing of that decade (Chappuis, Adrien.
The Drawings of Paul Cézanne. 2 vols. Greenwich, Conn., 1973, no. 1135), where it looks more like a framed embroidery on the wall and another chair stands in front of it. Theodore Reff, from
Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 73.