Nature morte au compotier et aux citrons

Gauguin painted this in Brittany around 1890, at the coastal hamlet of Le Pouldu, not long after his stormy two months with Van Gogh in Arles had ended in a breakdown and a broken friendship. He had carried a small Cézanne still life with him for years, and he half-joked to friends that his aim was to make a Cézanne. You can feel it in the solid bowl of fruit and the tipped-up table. Look to the side and there is a goose, a shape lifted from the painted folk furniture of the Breton villages around him. Today the picture is in Switzerland, in the Museum Langmatt at Baden, built from a Swiss couple's collection of French painting.