Braque trained as a decorator, taking his craftsman's certificate in 1901 after evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, and the trade left a permanent mark on his painting: the trompe l'oeil wood-graining and lettering he brought into Cubism came directly from techniques a decorator would have used on real furniture and walls^[2]. That craft background sits underneath the still lifes of his middle career too. Mixing sand into paint, the technique visible in works like this one, is a decorator's instinct for surface and texture applied to fine art, not a borrowing from any painterly tradition.

From 1909 Braque worked in close daily contact with Picasso, the two of them trading ideas so closely that Braque later called it being roped together like mountaineers on a single line^[1]. That partnership ended with the war. Braque enlisted, was shot in the head in 1915, and underwent trepanning; there was no lasting brain damage, but the convalescence removed him from Paris and from the Cubist arguments he and Picasso had been having for years^[1]. When he resumed painting in 1917 and 1918, he arrived at a settled conviction that Cubism had gone as far toward abstraction as it should, and he spent the following decade putting, in his own words, flesh back onto its bones through still lifes built around ordinary objects: fruit dishes, pitchers, patterned cloth, guitars^[1].

Through the 1920s and into the 1930s Braque worked in a series of still lifes centred on round pedestal tables and mantelpieces, built from broad, frontal, often vividly coloured planes that stay visually discrete from one another rather than blending^[4]. He regularly mixed sand into his pigment in these years, a technique that thickened the paint's surface and slowed a viewer's eye down, encouraging the kind of gradual, deliberate inspection Braque wanted rather than a quick glance^[1]. The tilted planes, heavy contours and voluminous presence of the objects in these pictures echo Cezanne's late still lifes, an influence Braque had absorbed since seeing Cezanne's memorial exhibition in 1907, years before Cubism itself began^[4].