The blue coffee pot

Émile Bernard's 'The Blue Coffee Pot' (1888) is a still life from his mature Cloisonnist period — the coffee pot as a domestic object transformed by his bold outline and simplified color into a subject of decorative and formal investigation. The blue of the coffee pot gives the work its chromatic key — Bernard's treatment of color in still life subjects was as radical as in his figure and landscape subjects, the blue asserted as an expressive decision within the Cloisonnist formal framework. His still-life engagement showed the breadth of his method's application.

Bernard renders the coffee pot and associated still-life elements with his fully developed Cloisonnist vocabulary — the pot's form bounded by the characteristic dark outline, the blue color flat and simplified rather than modeled through tonal graduation. The surrounding still-life objects create the compositional context for the dominant blue pot. His approach creates the paradox of the Cloisonnist still life: the familiar domestic object made strange through radical formal treatment.