Painted at the height of Gris's early engagement with Analytic Cubism, La Boîte de Cigares distills a simple still life into a patchwork grid of lines and colour, from which emerges the essential forms of objects: a box of cigars, a wine glass and bottle, a kitchen knife and cigarette. The oval bounds of the composition stand in for the table-top, while the wood of the panel support is left bare in places by the artist, to evoke the surface which it seeks to represent.

Although the work fits within the artist’s engagement with Analytic Cubism, this direct engagement with the materiality of the wood panel presages the incorporation of found objects, texture and collage that would become a defining feature of his mature Synthetic investigations.

This early work is a study for the impressive L'Homme au Café (1912), exhibited in the seminal Cubist exhibition the Salon de La Section d'Or, Paris, and today housed in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (fig. 1). The same wine glass and box of cigars placed atop a table appear in the finished painting.

The present work, like the Salon painting, reveals the strong influence of Picasso and Braque. The muted tonal range and oval format appear borrowed directly from these artists’ works from the early 1910s. Indeed, Gris’ admiration for Picasso at this time is evidenced by his famous portrait of the older artist (fig. 2), executed in the same year as La Boîte de Cigares and today housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, inscribed ‘Hommage à Pablo Picasso’.

Although the debt to the Cubist pioneers is obvious, the present panel also gives an early indication of Gris’ distinctive style, with a clear rectilinear grid underpinning the logic of the composition. The use of regular intersecting lines would be a defining feature of the artist’s mature works which, in contrast to the present example, have greater clarity and vibrancy. Table-top still lifes were a favourite subject for Gris, often featuring similar objects; a closely related work, Les Cigares, shows a similar composition on canvas (fig. 3).