By Luciano Migliaccio
The painting Still Life with Vase and Fruit, prior to the artist’s enrollment at the Academy in Rio de Janeiro and to his trip to Europe, demonstrates the talents of the young disciple of Almeida Júnior in São Paulo in the 1880s. Among Pedro Alexandrino’s total production, this work is outstanding for the simplicity with which the subject is presented. It is devoid of the effects used by Antoine Vollon, the most important end-of century French still-life painter who was the Brazilian artist’s teacher during his years in Paris. Alexandrino manages an approximation to the realism of the Spanish bodegon painting and to the intensity that characterizes the presence of objects in Chardin’s work, full of deep human meanings.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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