Pipe and Fruit-Dish with Grapes

Gris painted this in 1918, the year the First World War finally ended. After the sparse, anxious pictures of the middle war years, his still lifes had grown calmer and more resolved, the planes fitting together with an almost architectural ease. Here the objects are a smoker's pipe and a raised dish holding grapes, arranged on a table and rebuilt from clean overlapping shapes. The colour is warmer than in his wartime work, the rounded forms of the grapes and the bowl playing against the long straight stem of the pipe. Everything feels deliberately settled, each object given its own firm place. The stem of the pipe runs almost the full width of the table, a single straight line tying the composition together.