Still Life with Peaches

Still Life with Peaches (1889) at the Fogg Museum at Harvard belongs to the Pont-Aven period when Gauguin was in direct dialogue with Cézanne's still-life practice — he had owned a version of Cézanne's Bathers since the mid-1880s and was deeply familiar with his method. The peach was a fruit Cézanne had treated repeatedly, and Gauguin's choice of the same subject in 1889 was a deliberate engagement with his older contemporary's approach. His treatment diverges from Cézanne's in characteristic ways: where Cézanne built the peach's form through hundreds of carefully calibrated color strokes, Gauguin simplified to bold outlines and flat color zones, the two painters' methods demonstrating the different directions Post-Impressionism would take. The Fogg Museum's dual possession of this Gauguin and the Portrait of Jules Peyron Cézanne places both aspects of Post-Impressionist still-life practice in a single American institution.

The peaches sit against a cloth rendered in bold flat strokes of pink and cream, the fruit defined by clean arcs of ochre and orange rather than Cézanne's modulated facets. The brushwork is broader and more decisive than Cézanne's, with Gauguin's characteristic thick outline giving each element firm pictorial weight.