Still-Life with Apples and Grapes

What you are looking at

A shallow wicker basket heaped with red and green apples and bunches of black and pale green grapes sits on a white tablecloth, a little left of center. More fruit has spilled onto the cloth around it: a loose cluster of pale grapes in the left foreground with a small bunch beside it, a red apple at far left, two more apples at the front, and a pair of large yellow-green apples at the right. The cloth runs off the edge of the table at the lower right, where it is folded back to show a corner of polished brown wood with a carved or paneled front. The background is a dark, almost black wall, brushed with deep greens and browns, so the fruit and linen seem lit from the front against shadow.

The tablecloth is the real performance. Monet paints it in short, broken strokes of white, grey, lilac and blue, so the linen seems to shimmer and its damask pattern is suggested rather than drawn. The shadows on the cloth are blue, not grey, and the folds where it hangs over the edge are long strokes of blue-violet. The grapes are dabs of dark violet with single bright touches for highlights, and the apples are modeled with a few curved strokes of red over yellow-green. The basket is woven from short, criss-crossing strokes of ocher and brown. The signature sits at the upper right, written in red against the dark wall.

Look at the contrast of the two halves: the busy, crowded basket at left, the two calm green apples isolated at right. The diagonal of the table edge, running from lower right toward the center, ties them together.

Vétheuil, 1879–80

In 1879–80 Monet was living at Vétheuil on the Seine, in serious financial difficulty, and his wife Camille died in September 1879. He painted a group of fruit and flower still lifes in these years, works that were easier to sell than his landscapes and that dealers and collectors readily bought. They are still recognizably Impressionist: Monet treats the table as he treated a sunlit field, as a surface of colored light.

How it was painted

The canvas is fairly large for a still life, about 68 by 90 centimeters. The dark background was laid in broadly first, then the cloth, and then the fruit, each piece built up in a few loaded strokes. Monet's handling here is more fluid than in his earlier, carefully finished still lifes, and the white of the cloth carries as much color as any landscape sky. The dark wall, by contrast, is barely modulated, a backdrop that pushes everything else forward, as in the still lifes of the Dutch and Spanish seventeenth century that Monet would have seen in the Louvre.

Monet's still lifes

Claude Monet painted still lifes intermittently throughout his career, with clusters in the 1860s and around 1880. This picture belongs with Still-Life with Pears and Grapes (1880), in which the fruit lies directly on the cloth without a basket, and can be set against the earlier, more polished Still-Life with Melon of about 1872. A different canvas also titled Apples and Grapes, with fruit arranged across a long tablecloth, is in the Art Institute of Chicago. Compare also Monet's flower pieces of the same years, such as Bouquet of Sunflowers (1881), also at the Met.

Meaning

Fruit still lifes had long carried meanings of abundance or of passing time, but Monet's are not allegories. They are exercises in color and texture: the bloom on a grape, the gloss of an apple, the coolness of linen. In a hard year they were also a way to make a living, and the confidence of the handling shows none of the strain of the circumstances.

Where to see it

Apples and Grapes belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the gift of Henry R. Luce in 1957; check the museum's website for whether it is currently on view. See our guide to Monet at the Met.