Still Life with Lamp

By the time Gris painted this, in 1919, the war was over and Paris was catching its breath. That spring his dealer, Leonce Rosenberg, gave him a one-man show at the Galerie de l'Effort Moderne, the first real spotlight on him alone. The picture belongs to that settled, confident stretch of his work. Its subject is domestic and quiet: a lamp standing on a table among a few other objects, the kind of thing lit as the evening came on. Gris builds it from broad flat planes fitted together like inlay, the colours warmer and the edges calmer than in his lean wartime canvases. The lamp's round shade and upright stem give the composition its centre, a still point the other shapes are arranged around.