Jar of Peaches

Jar of Peaches is a small, brilliant still life Claude Monet painted around 1866: a glass jar of peaches preserved in syrup, with four fresh peaches beside it on a dark, reflecting tabletop. It belongs to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and hangs in the Galerie Neue Meister in the Albertinum.

What you are looking at

The jar stands left of center, tall and cylindrical, and almost fills the height of the picture. Its mouth is covered with a twist of white paper tied with string, the old way of sealing preserves. Inside, pale peaches are packed one on top of another, each one a soft globe of cream, yellow and rose, and studded here and there with dark cloves. A stick of cinnamon runs diagonally down through the fruit. The syrup glows a deep amber-orange around them, and a vertical streak of white on the glass shows the reflection of a window.

To the right, four fresh peaches sit in a loose row, their skins flushed pink and red against the cool gray-green wall. Beneath everything is the most surprising part of the picture: a dark, polished surface, perhaps a lacquered or marble-topped table, that reflects the jar and fruit upside down in warm, blurred shapes. Across this surface Monet drags thick, jagged strokes of white and gray, a pattern of reflected light that breaks up the reflections and makes the table look almost liquid. The signature is at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

In the mid-1860s Monet was in his mid-twenties, living between Paris and the Normandy coast with Camille Doncieux, often short of money and painting whatever might sell or be accepted at exhibitions. Still lifes were a respected, saleable genre, and he painted a number of them in these years, including the much larger Spring Flowers of 1864 and the tabletop Still Life with Flesh. Jar of Peaches is one of the most refined of the group. For the arc of these years, see Monet's life in paintings.

How it was painted

The picture is a lesson in painting transparency and reflection, the problems Monet would spend his life on. He did not draw the glass outline and fill it in. Instead he built the jar from the colors seen through it: amber syrup, pale fruit, a few highlights. The peaches inside are slightly distorted and dimmer than those outside, as they would be through glass and liquid. The reflections on the tabletop are painted wet into wet and then cut across with dry, broken white, so that the eye reads both the reflected objects and the shine on the surface at once.

The cool gray-green background and dark table set off the warm oranges and pinks of the fruit, a simple complementary scheme handled with great control. The strong side light and dark ground still recall Courbet and Manet, whose still lifes Monet admired, but the restless, reflective surface points ahead to the river paintings he would make a few years later at Bougival and Argenteuil.

Still life and reflection

Water and reflection became Monet's great subject, from Bathers at La Grenouillère in 1869 to the Water Lilies of his last decades. Seeing this jar of peaches and its double in the tabletop, it is hard not to think of the reflected light in Autumn Effect at Argenteuil or, much later, the reflected skies of Water Lilies in Giverny. Monet returned to still life in the early 1880s, in flower and fruit pieces such as Bouquet of Sunflowers, but the Dresden picture remains among the freshest he made.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Galerie Neue Meister (Gal.-Nr. 2525 B), the collection of 19th- and 20th-century art of the Dresden State Art Collections, displayed in the Albertinum on the Brühl Terrace. For other public collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.