Still Life with Chinese Peonies and Mandoline

This early Gauguin still life from 1885 predates his break with Impressionism and his departure for Tahiti, showing his initial formation as a Sunday painter under the influence of Pissarro and the Impressionist circle. Gauguin abandoned a successful Parisian stockbroker career to pursue art, ultimately leaving Western civilization altogether in search of what he called 'primitive' authenticity, first in Brittany and then in Tahiti. His rejection of academic naturalism in favor of symbolic color and simplified form was foundational to Symbolism, Fauvism, and Expressionism. He saw painting as capable of conveying spiritual and emotional truths inaccessible to descriptive realism.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat areas of strong color bounded by firm contour lines — a technique he called Synthetism, derived partly from medieval stained glass and Japanese prints. His palette is deliberately non-naturalistic, using vivid magentas, ochres.