At the Window

In March 1882, when the Impressionists opened their seventh group exhibition in Paris, Gauguin still had a job in the city's world of finance and painted in his spare hours. He showed 13 pictures there, one of them titled At the Window, and scholars now think it was most likely this one. The novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, reviewing the show, found Gauguin's colour dirty and dull. On the yellow tablecloth sit a lemon on a saucer, two lumps of sugar, a glass with a spoon in it and a big tankard of a Scandinavian type he had already painted in 1880. The canvas later went to a collection in Copenhagen, then to Berlin, where the Weimar industrialist Otto Krebs bought it in 1927. After the war his hidden collection was shipped to the Hermitage, and the picture stayed in storage, missing even from the 1964 catalogue of Gauguin's paintings, until an exhibition in 1995.