Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryStill Life: Wood Tankard and Metal Pitcher
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Compare the tankard’s rounded brown body with the pitcher’s narrow blue-gray profile, then follow the shadows they cast across the cloth.
Gauguin painted this still life in 1880, long before his Tahitian pictures. A broad wooden tankard and a narrower metal pitcher stand on a pale cloth, with a green cushion behind them. Their different materials emerge through warm and cool color, changes of surface, and the contrast between the large round vessel and the smaller angular one.
Oil on linen canvas · 54 × 65 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Post-Impressionism
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Still Life: Wood Tankard and Metal Pitcher
- Artist
- Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
- Date
- 1880
- Medium
- Oil on linen canvas
- Dimensions
- 54 × 65 cm (21 1/4 × 25 9/16 in.); Framed: 71.2 × 82 × 7 cm (28 × 32 1/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- A Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.







