Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cezanne

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Artist: Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
Medium: Oil on linen canvas
Size: 65.3 × 54.9 cm (25 11/16 × 21 5/8 in.); Framed: 82.9 × 73.4 × 10.5 cm (32 5/8 × 28 7/8 × 4 1/8 in.)
Museum: Art Institute of Chicago
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

The seated woman here remains unidentified, but the still-life painting dominating the background is well known: Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879–80; Museum of Modern Art, New York). Gauguin’s version is nearly the same scale as the original. In certain aspects of the compo-sition, Gauguin emulated Cezanne’s style, like the way he flattened the picture plane so that the woman appears to tip forward out of her chair.

Before becoming an artist, Gauguin was an art collector. Cezanne’s Still Life—one of five or six works by the artist in Gauguin’s collection—was a touchstone in his artistic education. It is possible that Cezanne referred to this work when he accused Gauguin of stealing his style, which he called his “petite sensation.”

This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection.

Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0.