Flowers and a Bowl of Fruit on a Table

Flowers and a Bowl of Fruit on a Table (1894) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was painted after Gauguin's return from his first Tahitian stay — a period of difficult readjustment when his Tahitian paintings had not sold as he had hoped and he was living in somewhat reduced circumstances in Paris and Brittany. The still life of European flowers and fruit reflected a return to familiar domestic subjects that provided both technical continuity with his earlier work and a kind of emotional respite from the ambitious Polynesian subjects. He incorporated into this European arrangement the heightened color and formal boldness he had developed in Tahiti, creating a hybrid that combined the traditional French still-life genre with the chromatic richness of his Polynesian palette. The MFA's strong collection of Gauguins from across his career places this domestic canvas in the context of the more ambitious works that surround it, showing how his still-life practice was transformed by the Polynesian experience even when he returned to wholly European subjects.

The still life is arranged with Gauguin's characteristic decorative clarity — flowers in a vase and fruit in a bowl providing the complementary forms of a traditional arrangement, but treated with his mature Synthetist palette of rich, unhesitating colour. The background is handled flatly, without atmospheric recession, giving the whole composition the vibrant, jewel-like surface of his best still lifes.