The work of Paul Cezanne led the way for paintings like Violin and Pitcher. Cezanne was interested in the way light reacted to form rather than what it was lighting: the form itself. Cezanne also began to explore the object that the viewer knows to exist in the painting; not just the view of the object gained by looking at it from one angle. Cezanne's work was largely known as impressionism. His impressionist paintings such as Basket with Apples, Bottle, Biscuits and Fruit were the beginning of what would become Violin and Pitcher. The unnatural tilting of the plate's surface made way for the multiple viewpoints in the violin and the lack of form or outline in the fruit the eventual faceting.

The subject matter of Violin and Pitcher can't be read immediately due to the rather heavy fragmentation. An obvious clue is the painting's title and upon inspection the viewer can soon find the violin in the foreground and the pitcher somewhere in the midground. Beyond the violin

and pitcher the painting's subject matter is less obvious. What the two objects are actually placed on, their base, either doesn't exist or has been fragmented to the point where it can no longer be seen. What does eventually come through are the walls of the room the painting is set in. Fragmented architecture draws the strong vertical lines of intersecting walls as they disappear into a sea of facets.

After Violin and Pitcher, cubism began to follow a new wave-length that would eventually become recognised as analytical cubism. Similar work echoing Violin and Pitcher soon began to arise, such as Braque's Woman with Mandolin (1910) and Picasso's Portrait of Ambroise Vollard. Both of these works embraced the heavily fragmented, faceted look and the multiple viewpoints of Violin and Pitcher. Woman with Mandolin is far more consistant with its fragmentation than Violin and Pitcher, as its facets are evenly distributed with no one area carrying more detail than another. Violin and Pitcher, however has more detail on the violin than anywhere else and similarly Portrait of Ambroise Vollard has more detail in the face. This treatment of one area of detail from which everything else flows eventually led to synthetic cubism, where no detail short of that of the object itself would do.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 899
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)