Mandolin and Fruit Dish

On 20 November 1925 Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, a German living in Lausanne and one of the leading collectors of Cubism, bought 28 pictures by Juan Gris on a single day at the Galerie Simon in Paris, the gallery of Gris's dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. This canvas was among them, finished that same year and signed Juan Gris 25 in the lower left corner. A mandolin and a fruit dish stand on a table with sheet music and a folded newspaper, each object drawn whole and easy to name. By 1933 Reber had sold it to a collector in Geneva, who lent it to the Gris exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Zurich that spring. In 1951 it turned up in a show of French still lifes at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris, listed there simply as The Guitar. Joseph Pulitzer Jr., publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, owned it by 1961 and gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1967.