Interpretive Resource

IMPRESSIONIST STILL LIFE Still-life painting played a minor but vital role in the history of Impressionism. With the single exception of Degas, all the important painters of the movement made still lifes, many of which are among the most ravishing in the history of the genre. Like portrait painting and landscape, still life was considered to be a lower form of artistic expression by the French Academy of Fine Arts. Related to the bourgeois art produced in Holland during the seventeenth century, still-life painting seemed to lack the moral and intellectual possibilities inherent in literary painting — whether of historical, mythological, or fictional subjects — that aimed to depict great themes or embody great intellectual aspirations.

It is difficult to make moral or intellectual claims for any arrangement of fruit and vegetables on a table, even these consummately balanced and painted compositions by Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. Monet, who painted Apples and Grapes in Vetheuil during the late summer of 1880, seems to have been looking down on a table covered with a fresh clean cloth, its fold-marks still visible. He may have made a precise arrangement of apples and grapes in a bowl and allowed the rest simply to be scattered over the table in groups. The large cooking apples hold down the left side of the composition, while the small red and green ones appear almost ready to roll from the lower right corner. The whole quivers with life and potential movement, as the fruits tilt and overlap and as the light plays over their juicy flesh.

Renoir’s 1881 still life is less brilliant in its composition than Monet’s, but it is considerably more interesting in its subject. Rather than using common fruits or vegetables, Renoir seems to have selected items for their shape, color, and texture. Rarely in the history of still-life painting have fruits and vegetables been combined so exotically and so freely. Perhaps, because the sense of taste is such an important component of the still-life aesthetic, painters have tended to represent fruits and vegetables that would be pleasing to eat together rather than those that just look good together. Paul Cezanne, the greatest master of modern still-life painting, rarely, if ever, broke this unwritten rule, but Renoir seems to have taken delight in doing so in his Fruits from the Midi. Although all of the objects represented in this painting are technically fruits, several of them — particularly the eggplants, the red peppers, and the small tomatoes — are not commonly cooked with fruits and certainly never would be combined with pomegranates! By allowing them all to spill over the rim of a beautiful blue and white plate, Renoir emphasized their abundance and alluring hue. The hard, pure shapes of the pomegranate and the lemon contrast with the irregular contours of the red peppers and the elegant play of lemon leaves. Indeed, this is less a still life about taste than about vision, and its playful exoticism would have appealed to Renoir’s great hero, Eugene Delacroix.

Perhaps because both of these still lifes were painted indoors, directly from stabile "setups," they lack the spontaneity of execution so commonly associated with Impressionist landscapes. Each form is carefully painted, each shadow observed. Of the two artists, Renoir was more intent upon stressing the three-dimensional physicality of his fruits and vegetables, and each of their contours is firmly controlled. Monet worked more freely, especially among the grapes and smaller fruits, and applied his paint with a wonderful gestural gusto. For instance, the grapes in Monet’s still life seem to exist, not individually, but as a bunch. For Renoir, color was the most im-portant component of the still life. For Monet, it was balance and motion.