Bowl of Fruit and Tankard before a Window

Gauguin spent much of 1890 in Brittany, among its fishing villages and farms, yet the strip of view across the top of this still life shows something else, a packed jumble of red roofs and pale walls that looks more like a town than the coast around him. No one has identified the place. The National Gallery points out that it does not even join up with the room in front of it the way a real window would, and it may be an invented scene. Below it the table is laid out in a borrowed language of fruit, a rumpled cloth and a knife jutting out at an angle, all familiar from the still lifes of Cézanne. The grey tankard with its dark blue decoration resembles the drinking mugs used in Brittany. In the lower left corner his signature, P Go, is painted upside down, perhaps to look as if someone had cut it into the tabletop.