After receiving training at the local art school in Le Havre, Braque went to Paris in 1900. There he studied (1902-04) at the Academie Humbert and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Leon Bonnat. Braque's early works, those of 1903-05, were executed in the mood of early impressionism. Greatly influenced by Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck, Braque entered (1906 or 1907) his Fauve period, in which he used soft undulating patterns and brilliant colors.

Unlike the other Fauves, however, he showed an interest in architectonic solidity of composition and an emphasis on strongly defined volumes rather than color and brushwork. A crucial change in Braque's art came in the fall 1907, when he rediscovered Paul Cezanne at the memorial exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne and the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. At this time, he also met Picasso. In the late work of Cezanne, both Braque and Picasso saw a new geometrization of form and new spatial relationships that were to become the basis of cubism.

Spurred by his close association with Picasso, whose Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07) has been called "the first painting of the 20th century," Braque transformed his style radically. Within three years, Picasso and Braque invented analytic cubism, a new, completely nonillusionistic and nonimitative method of depicting the visual world. Their concerns were so mutual and their association so intense that in many instances only experts can distinguish Braque's paintings of 1910-12 from those of Picasso. Violin and Pitcher (1910; Kunstmuseum, Basel) is one of the best examples of Braque's analytic cubism.

The paintings of this period are all executed in muted greens, grays, ochers, and browns. The objects are fragmented, as though seen from multiple viewpoints. This multiplicity introduced the element of time into vision. These fragments, or cubes, are organized along a grid, thereby creating a compact pictorial structure.