When Braque painted this work, Cubism was thirty years old and the artist had greatly modified his approach to the movement. He replaced the complexity and intellectual rigor of early Cubism with a less fragmented structure and brighter colour. The multiple view points of his earlier still lifes have given way to a more unified perspective on a simpler composition. To unify his picture, Braque used visual rhymes such as the fish tails and the angular notches of the green and yellow background. Despite the tilting planes and jagged shapes, the painting has the compositional balance and structure faithful to the classical ideals of the French painting tradition. In the early 1950s Braque's Paris dealer, Galerie Maeght, issued a limited edition print of this work, considering it one of the most