A remarkable early still life, Anémones et anthémis dans un vase was begun soon after Gauguin’s marriage in 1873, just as he was settling down in Paris to work as a stockbroker in a position secured by his guardian, Gustave Arosa. A wealthy financier, Arosa also had a formidable collection of modern French paintings which fueled Gauguin’s nascent artistic ambitions. Gauguin met Camille Pissarro at Arosa’s home and by 1879 became an unofficial pupil of the artist. At Pissarro’s invitation, Gauguin would go on to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions of the early 1880s which inspired him to leave his career as a financier behind him.

The superb use of black in his early still lifes, the short and thick brushstrokes and dramatic lighting clearly point to Gauguin’s engagement with the work of Édouard Manet at this juncture. Gauguin was also one of the earliest and most active collectors of Paul Cézanne, and like Cézanne, harnessed a directionality in his brushwork that endowed his paintings with a sense of dimension and texture achieved without the use of thick impasto or linear perspective. The present lot was previously known only from a black and white photograph published in the artist’s catalogue raisonnée, and only now can the bold accents and intense blunt strokes which create this animated and muscular composition be fully appreciated. The intense paintwork is particularly evident in the smaller strokes used for the flowers.

Even before the artist’s peregrinations to Pont-Aven, Martinique and French Polynesia in his quest for the unknown, Gauguin revealed a proclivity for the exotic, infusing the traditional still life genre with Japanese patterns and striking chromatic juxtapositions, such as the suggestion of a blue design on the vase in the present work. These themes also pervaded the works of his contemporaries such as Degas and Van Gogh, in keeping with French trend of Japonisme after the reopening of trade routes to the West in 1853. In some respects, the warmth of palette and yellow and purple tones seem to anticipate the richness of color that would entrance the artist in Tahiti.