Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cezanne (1890): Artwork and History

Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cezanne (1890) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

The seated woman here remains unidentified, but the still-life painting dominating the background is well known: Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879–80; Museum of Modern Art, New York). Gauguin’s version is nearly the same scale as the original. In certain aspects of the compo-sition, Gauguin emulated Cezanne’s style, like the way he flattened the picture plane so that the woman appears to tip forward out of her chair. Before becoming an artist, Gauguin was an art collector. Cezanne’s Still Life—one of five or six works by the artist in Gauguin’s collection—was a touchstone in his artistic education. It is possible that Cezanne referred to this work when he accused Gauguin of stealing his style, which he called his “petite sensation.” This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection.

Object facts

• Title: Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cezanne
• Date: 1890
• Artist attribution: Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Oil on linen canvas
• Dimensions: 65.3 × 54.9 cm (25 11/16 × 21 5/8 in.); Framed: 82.9 × 73.4 × 10.5 cm (32 5/8 × 28 7/8 × 4 1/8 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1925.753

Collection credit

Joseph Winterbotham Collection

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.