Still Life with Horse's Head

In May 1886 the Impressionists held their eighth and last group exhibition in Paris. What everyone argued about was Seurat's wall, and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, built out of small separate dots of colour. Gauguin was in the same show. He disliked the theory behind the dots and fell out with the younger painters pushing it, and then he went and tried the method himself. This still life is one of the results.

The objects on the table are an odd gathering. The horse's head is a plaster cast after one of the Parthenon horses, the sort of thing a studio kept for drawing practice. Behind it hangs a fan with a Japanese woodblock print pasted onto it, and there is an East Asian doll, both easy to come by in the Paris of the 1880s.

He sailed for Panama the following spring, and the dots did not go with him.