Still Life with Onions

Gauguin's 'Still Life with Onions' (1889) belongs to the post-Arles period — painted after the traumatic breakdown of his collaboration with Van Gogh and his return to Brittany. The humble onion as still life subject carries associations with peasant simplicity and the basic stuff of life, qualities that resonated with Gauguin's ongoing rejection of bourgeois sophistication. Van Gogh also painted onions in the aftermath of his breakdown, and the correspondence between their subject choices at this moment may not be coincidental — both painters were drawn to the most elemental, unaffected materials of daily life.

Gauguin renders the onions with his mature Synthetist approach — the forms clearly outlined against a simplified background, the color relationships between the onions' warm skins and the cooler ground creating the painting's essential visual structure. His handling is confident and direct, the still life's humble subject elevated through the quality of pictorial thought brought to its arrangement and rendering.