Still Life with Oil Lamp

The object that names this picture is an oil lamp, and in 1912 that was still an ordinary thing to keep on a table. Electric light was spreading through Paris, yet plenty of rooms were lit at night by burning oil or paraffin, and Gris painted the kind of small still life a person actually lived with. The canvas is modest, under half a metre tall. He breaks the lamp, a bottle and the surface around them into narrow facets of grey and brown with a cool touch of blue, so the shapes seem to slide across one another while you still recognise every object. This is Gris near the beginning, working in the restrained palette of his first Cubist year before he opened up to stronger colour. The lamp's rounded reservoir sits near the centre, one soft curve among all the straight edges.