Interpretive Resource

Pierre Auguste Renoir came from humble origins, and he always felt that his art lacked refinement. In 1881, confronting the limitations of the Impressionist style he had practiced up to that point, he decided to fill an educational gap by going to Italy to study ancient and Renaissance masterpieces. He probably painted this still life en route, in the south of France (along the Mediterranean coast, or Midi). It features an exotic combination of fruits and vegetables—peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, pomegranates, citrons, lemons, and oranges—breaking the unwritten rule that painters should select foods for their culinary compatibility rather than their visual appeal.

Renoir’s arrangement of objects in and around a blue-and-white plate is abundant but stable, and the background elements—a plain, white tablecloth and solid, blue-green wall—are even austere. The still-life genre allowed the artist to concentrate on form and local color. He deliberately weighed the relative placement of each fruit and vegetable, lending them a certain monumentality by using long, diagonal brush strokes. As unpretentious as this work appears, it represents a significant attempt on Renoir’s part to bring a classical sense of pictorial structure and balance to the fleeting luminosity of Impressionism—a goal that was pursued even more avidly by Paul Cézanne. Indeed, Renoir visited Cézanne in Provence on his journey back to Paris from Italy, and, although Fruits of the Midi was not painted under Cézanne’s direct influence, it does show that these two very different artists shared some fundamental aims.