Tahitian Women on the Beach
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Still Life with Three Puppies, Paul Gauguin, 1888. Oil on wood, 91.8 × 62.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Museum of Modern Art, New York replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
Still Life with Three Puppies
Paul Gauguin · 1888
- Medium
- Oil on wood
- Dimensions
- 91.8 × 62.6 cm
- Held by
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin was a successful Paris stockbroker who collected Impressionist paintings before he made any, and who gave up the career at thirty-five to paint full-time — leaving a wife and five children in Copenhagen in the process. The work that matters begins in Brittany, where from 1886 he developed with Émile Bernard a way of painting in flat areas of unmodulated colour bounded by heavy contours, borrowed in part from cloisonné enamel and Japanese prints. He spent nine weeks living with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, which ended badly and permanently.
Nearby
Related works
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
The Yellow Christ
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo
Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
What to look at
A still life that refuses to behave like one. The table is tipped up so steeply that the three goblets and the fruit sit on it as if pinned to a wall, and the puppies drinking from the pan at the top are seen almost directly from above while the fruit below is seen from the side. Two incompatible viewpoints in one picture, which is a Japanese-print device and which Gauguin is using here more aggressively than anywhere else that year. The blue cloth is laid in flat with a dark outline, the puppies are outlined too, and nothing is modelled. It was painted in Brittany in the same months as Vision of the Sermon. People often read it as a children's picture because of the puppies; it is more usefully read as the experiment where he worked out that he could abandon a single viewpoint entirely and the picture would still hold.