Still Life

Paul Gauguin

Oil on canvas

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) produced numerous still life paintings throughout his career, from his early Impressionist-influenced works to his Post-Impressionist period marked by bold color, flattened forms, and symbolic resonance. His still lifes characteristically deploy simplified patches of color and clearly defined outlines, reflecting his progressive departure from naturalistic representation. Gauguin began painting as an amateur while working as a stockbroker in Paris, and the still life genre served as a recurring laboratory for his evolving formal experiments, showing the influence of Cézanne while anticipating the decorative abstraction of his Tahitian works. These paintings occupy an important position in the history of Post-Impressionism, demonstrating how Gauguin transformed a conventional genre into a vehicle for expressive color and proto-Symbolist invention.