Georges Braque

signed G Braque (lower left)
oil on paper
63 by 61cm.
Painted in 1943.

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Jeanne Schlumberger, Paris 
Pierre Schlumberger (acquired from the above)
Paul-Albert Schlumberger
Acquired from the above in 1998

Maeght Éditeur, ed., Catalogue de l'oeuvre de Georges Braque: Peintures 1942-1947, Paris, 1960, illustrated pl. 56 (with incorrect dimensions)

Paper laid down on canvas. The edges are reinforced with tape. Under UV light a few scattered spots of inpainting fluoresce at upper left corner and two small vertical inch-long lines of inpainting descend from the top edge, one four inches from left edge and another from above the top of the pitcher. There is a small round patch of inpainting in the blue pigment one and a half inches in from the right edge and three inches up from the bottom edge as well as two other small pindots nearby and one nail-head sized spot just to the right of the lemon. Another two lines of inpainting intersect in the upper left quadrant, one about one and a half inches in the length and the other three and a half inches in length, otherwise fine. This work is in generally good condition.
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Pichet et poisson belongs to Braque's important series of still lifes and interiors painted during World War II. His artistic faculties and courageous vision were ideally suited for the genre, and it has been written: "Nobody else succeeded as [Braque] did in transforming a table covered with objects into a mental space, a cerebral as well as a visual stimulus. Braque's 'pedestal tables' reflect the subjectivity of the painter as much as the objectivity of an utterly ordinary environment" (Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, "Georges Braque's Still Lifes," in Georges Braque: Order & Emotionexhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, 2003, p. 19).

When the Germans occupied France in 1940, Braque was forced to flee—initially to the Limoges region and later to the Pyrenees—and when he returned to Paris he withdrew to his studio and lived as a recluse through the remainder of the war. He was remarkably productive during this period, though his resulting output is striking in its austerity and its focus on basic foods, for example loaves of bread, bowls of fruit and the occasional fish, which would seem to underscore the severe deprivation he experienced.