One of Gauguinââ¬â¢s favourite paintings was Cézanneââ¬â¢s Still Life with Compotier, Glass and Apple, 1879ââ¬â80, Museum of Modern Art, New York, which he acquired for his own collection around 1880.
This still life is a homage to that picture, and repeats many of its elements: the fruit, the pottery, the rumpled tablecloth and the angled knife at the lower right. The truncated diagonal brushstrokes and the flattened perspective, in which foreground and distance are collapsed together, are also reminiscent of Cézanneââ¬â¢s work.
The narrow strip at the top of the painting ââ¬â a dense arrangement of buildings ââ¬â is something of an enigma. The inclusion of a frame suggests that it is a view from a window, but there is no continuity between the clearly defined larger scene and the smaller blurred image next to it. No specific view has yet been identified, and it looks more like a cityscape than rural Brittany, where Gauguin was spending extended periods of time when this was painted.
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