Flowers and a Bowl of Fruit on a Table

In the spring of 1894 Gauguin was in France between his two voyages to the Pacific, and in May a badly broken ankle left him laid up for months at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The landscape painter Gustave Loiseau, 17 years younger, came to see him again and again while he recovered, and Gauguin gave him this small still life. It belongs to those two years back in Europe, when his colours went pale after the greens of Tahiti. A bowl of fruit and some flowers sit on a table, and the strongest notes are the bright citrus and the tasselled fringe along the edge of the mantelpiece. Loiseau kept the picture for 27 years. When he sold it in 1921 to Durand-Ruel, the Paris dealer, he wrote a letter describing the painting and how he had come to own it, and a copy of that letter went to Boston with the canvas.