Nature morte (Still Life), or Compotier et cruche décorée de cerfs, is a Cubist painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger.

[1] It was exhibited again 1 – 15 April 1917 at Nya Konstgalleriet (The New Art Gallery) founded by the Italian Futurist Arturo Ciacelli in Stockholm (reproduced in the catalogue).

It is an interior scene depicting various objects including a compotier filled with fruit, a carafe, pears, a cup, a vase of flowers, and a jug (cruche) decorated with dear (cerfs).

The fruits, bowl, jug and other elements are depicted as if seen from a side view and from above simultaneously, giving an illusion of an overall flattening of the picture plain—a devise used by Cézanne, from which all of the Cubists drew inspiration.

[6] Cézanne's reduction of the visible world into fundamental shapes (cone, cube, sphere), the faceted reconstruction of nature through purely painterly forms, the fracture and flattening of space,[7] are all present in Metzinger's picture.

[5][10][11][12] In this seminal work, he compares the similarities between the paintings of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes and Henri Le Fauconnier.

In Du "Cubisme", written the following year, Metzinger and Gleizes proclaimed: While Nature morte "shows the artist's mastery of abstraction and geometry", writes Sotheby's in their Lot notes, "all of the compositional elements combine to create a remarkable evocation of the still-life subject".