Hofer was a German Expressionist painter. He was appointed director of the newly established Berlin Academy of the Arts in 1945, an honor that must have felt to him like vindication. In 1937, Hofer’s work, like that of the other Expressionists, was included in the exhibition of so-called “Degenerate Art” staged by the Third Reich. Because his first wife was of Jewish descent, Hofer was professionally banned by the Nazis, only regaining his right to practice and sell his work after his divorce and remarriage to his second wife, who was considered sufficiently “aryan.”

The artist’s sophisticated brand of modernism is on full display in this modest still life, which is suffused with a Cézannean sense of volume and spatial ambiguity, shot through with Picasso’s Blue Period drama of color and brushwork. It was gifted by the wife of Otto Jeidels, a wealthy banker and patron of progressive art, who was forced to flee his native Germany because of his Jewish ancestry, ultimately relocating to San Francisco and vacationing regularly in Santa Barbara.