Still Life with Teapot and Fruit

Paul Gauguin

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Painted during Gauguin's second sojourn in Tahiti, Still Life with Teapot and Fruit (1896) depicts a tabletop arrangement of mangoes, a teapot, and other objects set against a Tahitian-style printed cloth, with a human figure glimpsed at the upper right through a door or window. The composition consciously emulates Cézanne's Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879–80), a work Gauguin deeply admired, substituting tropical fruit and Polynesian textile for Cézanne's apples and French floral wallpaper, thereby fusing his Post-Impressionist roots with his adopted Tahitian environment. Gauguin, a French Post-Impressionist whose work is closely associated with Synthetism and Primitivism, applied bold, flattened areas of color and clear contours characteristic of his mature style. The painting is now held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acquired through the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection.