Juan Gris, originally named José Victoriano Gonzalez, was a Spanish artist born in Madrid in 1887. He was considered as the "classical cubist" with his contributions to modern art and Cubism. While studying engineering at Madrid's School of Arts and Sciences, Gris also learned painting techniques from José Maria Carbonero, an academic artist and contributed his works to the local newspaper. In 1906, Gris moved to Paris in which he spent his entire life. Settling down in a tenement, he met painters such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Maurice Raynal. Gris began to develop his personal style in cubism in 1911, in a perceptive manner of Braque and Picasso, but more characterized by metal like glimmer. Unlike Braque and Picasso, Gris with his "synthetic cubism" painted with wide-ranging collages and bold colors and details as seen in the Guitar, Glasses and Bottle (1914). .
During World War One, Gris was suffering from poverty issue and two years after his work grew into "flat, colored architecture" as he described. Later in 1917 to 1920, Gris established a complex style in his painting, using objects and their shadow to introduce complex intersections with texture and color. While participating in the final exhibition of the Salon des Indépendants, a cubist association in 1920, Gris was ill with pleurisy. In the last couple years of his life, he wrote and lectured on his personal views on painting in most of the time. One of his works, On the Possibilities of Painting, was later widely published and translated. In 1927, he died of kidney failure in Paris, at the age of forty. .
Juan Gris painted Le Canigou in 1921. It was painted with oil on canvas, and it's currently preserved in Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York. It was a still life painting different from the traditional art pieces that offered a visual data of a real world.