Description
Six pieces of fruit are gathered close on a rumpled white cloth: two apples blushed rose over pale gold, a round red-skinned pomegranate, a pair of oranges, and a lemon nosing off the table’s edge. Renoir crowds them almost touching, so the eye takes in one warm mass of colour before it starts telling the fruits apart. Behind them a loose wash of blue and pink stands in for a drape or a spray of flowers, brushed so thin the canvas weave shows through.
Painted in 1911 and held by the Barnes Foundation, the small canvas (22.2 by 41.5 cm) carries the loaded, buttery brushwork of Renoir’s late still lifes: every highlight on the fruit skins sits as a single stroke rather than a smoothed surface. The print reproduces that texture at close range, so the reds and golds keep their glow instead of flattening into plain orange.
