Still Life with Profile of Laval

Still Life with Profile of Laval was painted around 1886 and features a profile portrait of Charles Laval, the young painter who would accompany Gauguin on his first voyage to Martinique the following year. The combination of still life objects and a painted profile of a friend recalls Cézanne's compositional experiments with multiple pictorial registers, a device Gauguin was actively studying at this period through his personal collection of Cézanne canvases. Laval's inclusion turns a conventional genre exercise into a record of an important friendship during the Brittany-Paris years, just before both men committed to the radical step of leaving Europe.

The composition layers two visual modes: a tightly observed arrangement of fruit and tableware in the foreground and a flat medallion-like portrait in the upper field. Gauguin suppresses deep recession, using even illumination to push objects toward the picture plane — a proto-synthetist flattening technique he was developing at this moment.