The studies leading up to Seurat's great masterpiece Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884-86) constitute a review of this artist's crucial stylistic evolution during the first half of the 1880s.

This still life belongs to Paul Cézanne's mature period. The same objects appear in six other paintings, most likely made in the little town of Melun, outside Paris, where Cézanne stayed for most of 1879 and into the first months of 1880. He masterfully represented the mix of objects with a restrained harmony in a simple and balanced composition.

Paul Cézanne's landscape paintings are often centered on houses, virtually all empty, abandoned, or ruined. But with the irony common in Cézanne's oeuvre, these dwellings provide a stable center to the landscapes in which they are placed, almost as if they will be re-populated later. The rugged canvas represents an inaccessible house, its door closed, its windows shuttered.

It was most probably during 1889, when he was briefly living in his friend Emile Schuffenecker’s studio that Paul Gauguin completed Portrait Vase of Mme.