The Ham

The Ham (1889) at The Phillips Collection in Washington was painted during Gauguin's time between Brittany and Arles — a period of intense formal development when his still-life practice was being transformed by the Synthetist principles he had developed with Émile Bernard at Pont-Aven. A ham joint on a table was among the most prosaic of still-life subjects, but Gauguin's bold, unhesitating treatment — the warm pink-red of the meat against the tablecloth, the simple arrangement that gave the subject a formal dignity it had no conventional claim to — transformed it into a demonstration of his liberating approach to color and form. The Phillips Collection in Washington, which holds this canvas as one of its significant Post-Impressionist works, was founded by Duncan Phillips in 1918 as one of the first modern art museums in America, and its acquisition of important Gauguins alongside major Cézannes, Renoirs, and Van Goghs reflected Phillips's early recognition of the Post-Impressionist generation's centrality to modern art.

The ham is placed boldly against a surface of orange and pink, painted in broad, relatively smooth strokes that emphasize the dense material weight of the meat. Color temperature shifts from the warm ochres of the flesh to cool blue-violet shadows underneath, a chromatic contrast Gauguin uses to model the form without academic chiaroscuro.