Picasso, Pablo Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table Paris, winter 1908-1909 Oil on canvas 64 5/8 x 52 1/4 in. (164 x 132.5 cm.) Kunstmuseum, Basel Daix 220 ©2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

From John Golding, "Cubism, A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914":

"Bread and Fruit Dish existed in an earlier version; it...began life as a figure piece. The composition of the painting and its original theme was developed from two ambitious watercolors of late 1908 entitled 'Carnaval au bistrot', which showed five figures, one wearing a harlequin's hat and another a beret, disposed round a drop-leaved table; the compositions of these watercolors are markedly horizontal. A presumably slightly later gouache, executed on a block-like, upright format, shows the number of figures reduced to four: three seated figures and the same female attendant advancing from the background holding a bowl of fruit. Seated from left to right are a woman, a central harlequin and a man wearing a Cronstadt hat. In the lower part of the great still life, sketchily blocked in, we see the same configuration of legs as in the studies on paper. Above, the compotier with fruit and drapery replaces the female figure at the left. William Rubin has suggested that the Gilles-like figure in the watercolor studies is a reference to Douanier Rousseau, clad most characteristically in his beret, and that his presence is still evoked in the left-hand side of the still life through stylistic allusions to his work in terms of insistently if softly modelled forms, smoothly rendered in nuances of Douanier-like greens. The central harlequin of the studies Rubin identifies as Picasso himself (and so indeed he was wont to portray himself) and the man in the Cronstadt hat as Cezanne, who often wore one. These figures have been replaced in the still life by loaves of bread, echoing the position of their arms; their trunks and heads have been eliminated. The right-hand side of the painting, as Rubin poins out, is Cezannesque in feeling... Bread and Fruit Dish is a work of extraordinary gravitas; and it has about it a physicality and a presence seldom associated with ordinary still life."