Still Life with Teapot and Fruit

A teapot and a bowl sit among mangoes and other fruit on a cloth spread across a table, the whole set against a dark, close-toned ground. The picture belongs to the still lifes Paul Gauguin painted in Tahiti in the middle years of the 1890s, when the island had become his permanent home and the ordinary objects of his household — fruit, a jug, a teapot — entered his work on equal terms with the figures he found there. Gauguin (1848–1903) had first sailed for the South Seas in 1891, returned to France long enough to exhibit and quarrel with the Paris art world, and left again in 1895 for the last eight years of his life. The paintings of these years simplify form and intensify colour, and the late still lifes are among the most admired of them: arrangements built on a few strong shapes, painted with the frank, unmodulated colour and the heavy, deliberate contours that later artists took as a starting point. The painting is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.