Émile Bernard

Jacques Normand, Paris
Mme Delanoue-Baril, Paris
Ansley Graham, Los Angeles
Sale: Christie's, New York, May 17, 1984, lot 319
Acquired at the above sale

Jean-Jacques Luthi, Émile Bernard, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1982, no. 87, illustrated p. 19

Painted circa 1887, Nature morte aux pommes et aux pots bretons is a striking composition from the artist's early oeuvre. Bernard's most notable compositions date from this early period in his career, when he worked alongside other leading members of the late nineteenth-century art world including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Eugène Boch. The present work was painted when he was living in the Pont-Aven, just a year after he first met Gauguin, and is typical of the early Nabis aesthetic, with traditional hand-painted Breton pottery incorporated into a still-life composition rendered in a luminous palette blues, yellows and reds.