Still Life with Three Puppies
Artwork by Paul Gauguin • 1888
🖼️ Reproduce this artwork — 📗 Book on Paul Gauguin on Amazon
About this artwork - painting analysis
Created in 1888, "Still Life with Three Puppies" by Paul Gauguin bears witness to a pivotal period in the artistic evolution of the French painter. This bold composition brings together disparate elements: three puppies positioned around a bowl – two at the top and one on the right – green cups and goblets arranged in the centre, as well as a still life of fruit and a bowl in the lower section. The vertical arrangement, unconventional for the time, creates an upward dynamic that breaks with the academic codes of traditional still life. The dominant tonalities oscillate between deep greens, luminous yellows and delicate blues, while the pastel-tinted background reveals faded floral motifs that lend a decorative dimension to the whole.
The pictorial technique testifies to the synthetist style that Gauguin develops during his stay in Pont-Aven in Brittany. The forms are simplified, outlined by dark contours recalling Japanese cloisonné, and the flat areas of intense colours free themselves from naturalistic representation. This anti-impressionist approach marks the painter's desire to transcend the mere transcription of reality in order to achieve a more symbolic and decorative expression. The puppies, treated with a certain formal naïveté, contrast with the more elaborate rendering of the objects, creating a visual tension characteristic of Gauguin's work.
Held at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, this canvas of 88 x 62 cm illustrates the artist's transition towards primitivism that would mark his later Tahitian works. In 1888, Gauguin seeks to emancipate himself from Impressionism and dialogues with Émile Bernard about new aesthetic paths. This hybrid still life, mingling domestic animals and everyday objects in an audacious composition, prefigures the innovations that would influence the Nabis and the Fauves, affirming Gauguin as an essential precursor of pictorial modernity.
If you appreciate "Still Life with Three Puppies" and other paintings by Paul Gauguin, we offer you 10% off the purchase of an art poster from our partner europosters with the promo code GRANDSPEINTRES10.
Image license: faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.
