It was only in 1910 that Derain, somewhat belatedly, turned his attention to the still life. Despite possessing a varied and exquisite collection of applied art from all around the world, Derain limited his still life subjects to bottles, clay pitchers, and glazed vases. The still life Table and Chairs represents a sort of culmination to Derain’s searches in the area of colour and form and is a synthesis of all he gained from Cézanne and from Cubism. A classical pyramid construction formed of pottery and porcelain tableware is positioned on a table that is angled to the viewer’s eye. The painting is wrought with exactly that balance of green and brown-reds that would appear dull if it were not for the play of the reflexes on the white porcelain.

The years 1913-1914 are often termed Derain’s “Gothic period.” In the still life View from the Window (1912-1913, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), he used exactly the same objects as in previous works, but their meaning is changed in the new context of this composition. The perpendicular window frame which forms the axis of the painting seems to draw the tableware and the trees beyond the window with it in a vertical direction, evoking associations with Gothic church architecture.

The Renaissance landscape with its playful clouds frozen beyond the window, reminds one more than anything of a theatrical backdrop. Derain creates a scene where the curtain is drawn up and the front stage flooded with the white of the primed, but unpainted canvas, while the objects are actors who people the stage. The Gothic “key” which Derain had discovered in the intervening years dominated form, colour, and even technique. Derain’s painting was founded on all his immense stock of erudition, his knowledge.

Derain’s mind was attracted by the erudite path but the world he saw was too gloomy and hopeless, he himself too prey to the torments of discontent and duality. The atmosphere in pre-war Europe — a feeling of instability and impending doom — intensified Derain’s growing spiritual crisis: “The further I go the more alone I am. And I fear to be abandoned completely.”[41] In Saturday (c. 1913, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), life is concentrated in the darkness of the room where Derain’s dull greens and dark browns seem almost like flashes of light amongst the hopeless blackness of this enclosed world. The folds of needlework in the woman’s hands seem to be a frozen cascade of water. A silence of foreboding hangs over the scene, with life paralyzed in expectation of a tragic denouement.

The 1914, Portrait of a Girl in Black (c. 1913-1914, Hermitage) is the final result of a number of portraits that Derain painted of the same model. This earlier would seem to have achieved Derain’s aim completely, the model’s individuality being brought out, the exclusion of everything secondary and incidental, as well as the attainment of a concise means of expression where line and colour create a classical purity and beauty. In the second portrait, little appears to have changed — only now the figure has been removed a very long way from the viewer, almost as if viewed through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Emptiness has appeared — a cold, pale blue space. The carefully modelled face with its large constituent forms has taken on the immobility of a wooden sculpture, thereby intensifying the harshness of the lace collar and the back of the chair. The relationship between the figure and the space, combined with this passionless inertia, impart such strength of expression to the subject’s appearance that the portrait has almost become an icon of loneliness.