果物鉢とレモンの静物

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.