Catalogue Note
An exquisite example of Gauguin's unbound creative spirit, Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline is filled with the sort of rich, jewel-like hues and striking tonal and textural contrasts that characterize the artist's greatest works. The present painting was executed in 1885 at a watershed moment in Gauguin's career, during which t.mes he began to move away from the Impressionist aesthetic that had previously influenced his painting toward a new and more expressive stylistic idiom. Expanding upon the bold coloration and defiant brushwork pioneered in works like Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline, Gauguin soon became a leading figure in the Post-Impressionist movement.
The very nature of the still life genre, with its mutable and readily available components, allowed Gauguin an enhanced sense of freedom and opportunity for experimentation in his work. Freed from the various limitations of live models, the demands of patrons or the intransigence of landscapes, Gauguin achieved in his still lifes a radical harmony of color and texture. As Claire Bernardi notes, “Beginning in 1880, Gauguin painted several still lifes and scenes of everyday domestic interiors [...] He wrote to Camille Pissarro about his inclination toward this humble class of work, which he saw as holding more potential than traditionally privileged modes such as history painting: 'Great paintings have lost their raison d’être… What we have left are genre or landscape'" (Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée d’Orsay and The Art Institute of Chicago, Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, 2017, p. 96) (see fig. 1).
The present work was painted after the artist's arrival in Copenhagen, where he rejoined his wife Mette and their five children. In a letter to his mentor and early supporter Pissarro, Gauguin described Copenhagen as “extraordinarily picturesque,” expressing both his thrill at the number of subjects his new surroundings offered and his disappointment at not being able to paint outdoors due to sub-zero temperatures. Initially it was Gauguin’s confinement indoors that propelled him to turn to the subject of still life during his Nordic sojourn, though the peonies featured in the present work (traditionally bloom from May to June) suggest a date of execution more closely with the spring months.
“Now I am painting only for myself, without rushing, and I can assure you that it is extra strong this t.mes .”
Fig. 3 Paul Cézanne, Nature morte à la soupière, circa 1877, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
The stylistic shift visible in Gauguin’s works from this period owed much to the increasing influence of Paul Cézanne, with whom the artist had spent extensive t.mes in Pontoise several years prior. As Gauguin elaborated in a letter dated January 1885 to his friend and fellow artist Claude-Émile Schuffenecker, “Cézanne [...] shows a liking in his forms for the mystery and deep calm of a man who has lain down to dream; his color is solemn like the character of the Orientals; as man of the Midi he spends entire days at the top of the mountains reading Virgil and looking at the sky... Like Virgil, who has several meanings, and whom one can interpret as one wishes, so the literature of his paintings has the character of a parable that works on two levels; his backgrounds are as much fantasy as reality…” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Gauguin and Impressionism, 2005, pp. 230-31). By 1884 Gauguin also owned several canvases by Cézanne, including Compotier, verre et pommes (see fig. 2), and as such would have had an opportunity to closely study and emulate the artist’s technique.
Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline brilliantly highlights the inspiration that Gauguin derived from Cézanne’s work while using it to develop his own unique pictorial vocabulary. In the present work, Cézanne’s influence is clearly discernible in its slightly skewed perspective, the employment of diagonal brushstrokes and the outlines defining the shapes of flowers and leaves (see figs. 2-3). Likewise, the multi-layered color application for which Cézanne is well-known is noticeable here in the manner in Gauguin's rendering of the background and the tablecloth, imbuing the composition with depth and tonal complexity. Yet, as Richard R. Brettell remarks, “Rarely did Gauguin approach the ‘constructivist stroke’ of Cézanne, preferring his ‘woven’ facture” (ibid., p. 171). This dynamic brushstroke style has been primarily employed here to paint the placemat on which the vase stands, yet it also ‘spills’ onto the tablecloth and animates the entire composition.
The dominant blue palette in Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline is exceptional not only for its brilliance and rarity within Gauguin's oeuvre but also for its evocative symbolism within art history. Often connoting the numinous and the divine, the color blue and its spiritual significance would not have been lost on the artist, who was raised in the Catholic tradition. From the frescoes of Giotto and the characteristic mandorlas of the Virgin Mary to starry skies of Van Gogh and the nudes of Yves Klein, the color blue has captured the imagination of artist for centuries (see figs. 4-5). The brilliant hue which dominates Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline reappears occasionally throughout Gauguin's oeuvre (see fig. 6), though rarely to such an alluring and impactful degree.
Inspired by the multiplicity of meanings in Cézanne’s oeuvre, Gauguin fills the present work with numerous allusions to his private life and the sources of inspiration that had defined his creative development up until then. As Bernardi notes, “In his canvases from this period, Gauguin prominently featured ordinary objects of significance to him, reusing them in multiple works. In so doing, he positioned them as protagonists that represent his personal narrative” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée d’Orsay and The Art Institute of Chicago, Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, 2017, p. 96). While the off-center and cropped composition evokes the work of his close friend Edgar Degas, the landscape visible in the far left corner has been identified as Verger en Île-de-France by Armand Guillaumin, which Gauguin owned and brought with him to Denmark (see feature below). The inclusion of an Impressionist work painted en plein air acts as a link to the movement which Gauguin had embraced during the late 1870s and early 1880s when he exhibited with the Impressionists.
FIG. 4 ARMAND GUILLAUMIN, VERGER EN ÎLE-DE-FRANCE, 1878, OIL ON CANVAS, PRIVATE collects ION
The mandolin occupying the center of the composition is an instrument that Gauguin owned and played and which features in a number of his early works. Art historians likewise link this work to a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Italienne assise jouant de la mandoline (see fig. 7), which at the t.mes belonged to Gauguin’s early patron Gustav Arosa. This would undoubtedly have been one of the works Gauguin would see at Arosa’s house and would have been integral to his formation as an artist, with many Impressionists early on in their careers directly inspired by the Barbizon school painters.
"I must admit that my mandolin which I'm now pretty good at is a real friend here when I'm alone. I get a lot pleasure from music."
The blue vase visible in the present work features in other still lifes from this period, like Mandoline sur une chaise. The inclusion of the vase and the patterned ceramic plate in the background of the present work highlight Gauguin’s interest in the medium, pre-empting his enthusiastic involvement with it a year later. In 1886 he was introduced to the ceramicist Ernest Chaplet, who had trained at the Sèvres factory, and he soon started working on his ceramics with great vigor. The still lifes executed from 1886 onwards frequently feature Gauguin’s own ceramic creations.
An exceptional example of Gauguin’s bold experimentation with the still life genre during the mid-1880s, Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline was in the collects ion of the influential art dealer Ambroise Vollard by 1922. Vollard was instrumental to the development of Gauguin’s career, among others, organizing several major exhibitions of the artist’s work after his departure to Tahiti in the early 1890s. Following Vollard’s sudden death in 1939 and the subsequent conspiracy his brother Lucien entered with the art dealers Martin Fabiani and Étienne Bignou, the present work entered their inventory in 1940. Fabiani and Bignou sold the work to Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany in February 1941. In 1950, the painting was returned to France, first entering the collects ion of the Musée du Louvre and later transferred to Musée d’Orsay in 1986, where it has remained until its return to the Vollard heirs in February 2023.
The Museum Context: A Selection of Gauguin’s Early Floral Still Lifes
