Portuguese Still Life is one of twelve paintings Delaunay executed while living in Portugal during World War I. Several years earlier, his friend, the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, sought to define a new art movement called Orphism, based on Delaunay’s manner of combining vivid Fauvist color with the analytic structure of Cubism. Throughout 1913, Delaunay continued to explore color and achieved complete abstraction in a series of paintings depicting chromatic disks. However, by the time he painted Portuguese Still Life in 1915, he returned to observed reality for inspiration. Commenting on his still-life compositions, Delaunay noted, “The objects have their life defined by color that gives them their weight and their veritable structure... [They] are rendered according to their relationships of sensibility as though they were humanized. They regard the spectator; the eyes of the spectator come alive in them.”