Fruit Dish on a Garden Chair

Fruit Dish on a Garden Chair (1890) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was painted during Gauguin's complex final months in Europe before his first departure for Tahiti. He was in an unsettled state — planning the escape to the Pacific that he hoped would solve both his financial and his artistic problems — and the still life of a fruit dish placed outdoors on a garden chair reflects the transitional quality of his imagination at this moment. The hybrid nature of the subject — a domestic interior still-life object placed in the exterior landscape setting of a garden — was characteristic of his search for new combinations. The open-air still life, where the garden chair occupied a space between interior domesticity and exterior landscape, gave him a formal problem he had not previously addressed. LACMA's strong collection of European modernism places this canvas in a broader context of French avant-garde developments from Impressionism through Cubism, in which Gauguin's role as a bridge between Impressionist practice and the more radical departures of the early twentieth century is clearly visible.

The composition plays on the contrast between the geometric human object — the garden chair — and the organic forms of the fruit. Colour is rich and unhesitating — deep reds, bright greens, strong yellows — applied with Gauguin's characteristic flat boldness. The outdoor light creates strong shadows that are nevertheless handled with decorative intent rather than naturalistic precision.