Technical information
- Title : Still Life with a Compote Dish
- Date : c. 1935
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 55 × 46 cm
- Location : Private collection *
Biographical / historical context
Around the mid‑1930s, André Breuillaud explored still life as a privileged field of experimentation: an intimate space in which the placement of volumes, the circulation of light, and chromatic harmonies can be tested with great freedom. In such compositions, the artist seeks less an anecdote than the tension between simple elements—fruit, a bowl, drapery—so as to establish a dense, silent pictorial presence.
Formal / stylistic description
At the centre, a white compote dish on a short foot holds an abundance of fruit: clusters of golden grapes, pears, and plums in purplish tones. The motif is placed on a table in warm browns, seen at a slight angle, while a green‑blue drape closes the background.
Broad, visible brushwork makes the surfaces vibrate through light highlights and coloured shadows, giving the fruit a fleshy materiality and an inner luminosity.
Comparative analysis / related works
This still life belongs to the modern tradition of the “table composition”: simple construction, balance of masses, and the primacy of the colour‑light relationship. The contrast between the compote dish’s whiteness and the warm range of the fruit (yellows, oranges, reds) is tempered by the cool background (greens, blue‑greys), creating depth without relying on a strongly marked perspective.
The treatment in juxtaposed touches, favouring sensation and vibration, aligns the work with a post‑Impressionist sensitivity, while retaining a will toward synthesis that already signals, in Breuillaud, a growing attention to the internal coherence of pictorial space.
Justification of dating and attribution
The attribution to André Breuillaud is supported by the signature at lower right and by a characteristic pictorial manner: assertive touches, modelling through colour, and the search for warm/cool accords. The dating c. 1935 is proposed in view of this handling, still descriptive but already synthetic, prior to the more experimental and organic developments of maturity. The absence of an inscription on the reverse does not contradict this set of indicators.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Private collection *.
Public sale: Me Ruellan, Vannes, 21 February 2026.
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud