Still Life: Wood Tankard and Metal Pitcher

Paul Gauguin produced a small group of still lifes in the years when he was still a stockbroker and Sunday painter moving among the Impressionists, works that already announce the shape of his later art. This one, painted in 1880, shows the self-taught artist testing the lessons of Cézanne against the austere objects of the Parisian household. A turned wood tankard and a metal pitcher stand on a table against a wall hung with patterned cloth, their forms simplified into broad planes and their surfaces locked in a single, sombre harmony. The picture dates from the very years in which Gauguin began to abandon naturalistic description for the flat, decorative structure that would culminate in his Breton and Tahitian work, and it is one of the earliest still lifes to reveal the direction his art would take. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.