Still Life with Bottles and Fruit

On 17 March 1893 Bernard sat down and wrote out a list of his own paintings, heading it as an inventory made before leaving for Italy. He was 24 and thought he would be gone a short while. The route ran through Pisa, Genoa and Florence, then Istanbul and Jerusalem, and ended in Egypt, where he settled in Cairo and stayed about ten years. This still life is dated to roughly that moment, 45 by 32 centimetres, bottles and fruit set close to the picture surface. Pots, bottles and apples stayed in his repertoire for the rest of his life. The museum sent it to Tokyo in 1996 for an exhibition of still lifes from its own collection.