Still Life

Paul Gauguin

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This still life painting is associated with Paul Gauguin and originates from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gauguin, born in Paris in 1848, was a French Post-Impressionist artist whose work became closely aligned with Symbolism and his own distinctive Synthetist style, characterized by bold color, flattened forms, and expressive outline. Throughout his career, Gauguin returned repeatedly to the still life genre, drawing influence from Paul Cézanne's constructive brushwork and compressed pictorial space, while infusing his compositions with a symbolic weight distinct from academic tradition. Still life painting served Gauguin as both a technical proving ground and a vehicle for personal artistic statement, bridging his Impressionist beginnings and his later radical departures.