Still Life with Pipe

The canvas is barely 32 centimetres tall, painted in 1914. The pipe is the easiest thing to find, a long brown stem slanting up from its bowl near the bottom edge. Pipes turn up often in Cubist still lifes of these years, in Paris as in Prague, among the glasses, bottles and newspapers of the café table.

Look at the tabletop around the pipe. Its streaky strokes of ochre and brown seem to imitate the grain of wood, a device Braque had brought into Cubism from his early training as a house decorator. The rest of the picture keeps to muted greys, creams and earthy reds, with the signature running along the bottom edge. Since 2012 it has been at the Belvedere on permanent loan from the Rotter collection in Vienna.