Still Life with a Sketch after Delacroix

Still Life with a Sketch after Delacroix (1887) is a fascinatingly self-referential work by Paul Gauguin in which a conventional still life arrangement is combined with a visible sketch after Eugène Delacroix — an act of deliberate homage to the Romantic master whom Gauguin venerated as a founding figure of modern color painting. Delacroix's influence on Post-Impressionist thinking about expressive, non-naturalistic color was immense, and by incorporating a sketch after him within a still life composition, Gauguin explicitly places himself within this lineage of coloristic liberation. Painted during Gauguin's transitional period before his first Tahitian voyage, the work reveals his growing ambition to move beyond Impressionist naturalism toward a more symbolic and personally expressive mode of painting. The juxtaposition of observed objects and artistic quotation anticipates the layered visual references that would characterize his mature Synthetist work.

Gauguin's brushwork here combines the structured, deliberate strokes of his post-Impressionist technique with looser, more gestural handling in the Delacroix sketch. The palette balances warm ochres and earth tones in the still life elements against cooler, more vivid passages in the copied sketch, creating a dialogue between two modes of color thinking.