Still life with parrots

Still Life with Parrots is among Gauguin's most luxuriously decorative works from his final Marquesan period, combining the vivid plumage of tropical birds with the lush fruit and vegetation of the Pacific. Parrots had long appeared in European still life painting as exotic emblems of wealth and far-flung trade — Gauguin's parrots carry that history while being embedded in the actual tropical world that earlier painters had only imagined. By 1902 Gauguin was increasingly confined by illness to Atuona, and the concentrated splendor of this still life suggests both a celebration of the Pacific world he inhabited and a valedictory intensity. The Pushkin Museum in Moscow holds this as one of its major Gauguin acquisitions.

Gauguin arranges the parrots and fruit in a compressed, nearly frontal composition that emphasizes the purely decorative interaction of their colors — red, green, yellow, and blue — against a warm ground. The paint is applied with confident, broad strokes that define form through color relationships rather than modeling.