Still Life with Peaches

Still Life with Peaches, now at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, was painted in 1889 during Gauguin's stay in Pont-Aven and represents his synthesis of Cézannian structure with his own more decorative instincts. He had studied Cézanne's still lifes directly—he owned several—and the peaches here show the clear influence of that encounter while asserting his stronger preference for outline over atmospheric modeling. The Fogg acquired the work as part of its early twentieth-century commitment to modern French painting.

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.