Georges Braque

Private Collection, France (acquired directly from the artist in 1943)
Private Collection, France (by descent from the above)
Acquired by the present owner in London in 1998

Jean Paulhan, Braque le Patron, Geneva, 1947, illustrated p. 149
'Georges Braque', in Le Point, France, 1953, illustrated p. 9
Galerie Maeght (ed.), Catalogue de l'œuvre de Georges Braque. Peintures 1936-1941, Paris, 1961, illustrated p. 80
Nadine Pouillon & Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Braque, Paris, 1982, illustrated p. 114

The canvas is not lined. There are two nailhead-sized spots of retouching to the upper edge of the knife and to the right of the cheese. There is an intermittent thin line of retouching towards the lower right corner, a 8cm. line of retouching on the lower edge close to the signature and some tiny specks of retouching, mainly to the white tablecloth. All retouching is visible under UV light. Apart from a worn canvas edge in the lower left corner (not visible when framed), this work is in good condition.
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The present work, executed by the founder of Cubism himself, is a stunning example of George Braque's mature œuvre. Throughout his career Braque continued to experiment with the pictorial language of Cubism, focusing primarily on the still-life. The works of his later period are characterised by a more restrained approach to Cubist forms, in line with the revival of interest in Neo-Classicism and what Jean Cocteau referred to as le rappel à l'ordre across French society.

Darker pigments become a dominant element of the artist's later palette and these works tend also to be smaller in size, making the present work exceptional for it large scale and rich colours. The return to order in terms of Braque's work resulted in a focus on the French tradition of still-life painting, with Chardin, Corot and Manet providing his sources of inspiration, resulting in more naturalistic and accessible works. However, the rendering of a tactile sense of space is still Braque's pre-eminent artistic concern, even in these later works: 'There is in nature a tactile space, I might almost say a manual space... This is the space that fascinates me so much, because that is what early Cubist painting was, a research into space' (Braque quoted in John Golding, Braque, Still Lifes and Interiors, London, 1990, p. 9).

Fig. 1, Georges Braque, circa 1932