Still Life

Still Life (1899) at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem belongs to the quiet domestic production Gauguin maintained alongside his major figure compositions through his second Tahitian stay. By 1899 his large-scale mythological and philosophical canvases were becoming physically more demanding as his health declined, and the still life provided a format that required less sustained physical effort while maintaining the daily discipline of formal observation. The Israel Museum's Gauguin collection — which also includes the 1880 Houses at Vaugirard, the 1887 Village in Martinique, the 1891 Upa Upa, and this 1899 still life — spans a remarkable twenty years of his career across four radically different periods, making the museum's Gauguin holdings among the most chronologically comprehensive in any single institution outside France.

The objects are arranged with attention to the interaction of colour and form rather than descriptive accuracy. The handling reflects whichever period of Gauguin's development the work belongs to — more Impressionist in the early 1880s, flatter and more deliberate by the late 1880s. The background is typically kept subordinate to allow the objects to read clearly.