Still Life with a Sketch after Delacroix

In 1887 Gauguin was still a few years from Tahiti and from the fame that came with it. He had walked away from a career in business, and that year he sailed to Martinique in the Caribbean, chasing warmth, cheap living, and colour he could not find in France. This small still life seems to come out of that trip: bright tropical fruit and a heavy glass bottle on a plain table. On the wall behind it hangs a print after a drawing by Eugene Delacroix, the older French painter he admired, showing Adam and Eve driven out of paradise, set right above his own heap of island fruit.