Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

Claude Monet

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

Oil on Canvas, Painting

39 3/8 x 31 3/4 in.

1869

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a successful caricaturist in his native Le Havre, but after studying plein-air landscape painting, he moved to Paris in 1859. He soon met future Impressionists Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir and Monet began painting outdoors together in the late 1860s, laying the foundations of Impressionism. In 1874, with Pissarro and Edgar Degas, Monet helped organize the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc., the formal name of the Impressionists' group. During the 1870s Monet developed his technique for rendering atmospheric outdoor light, using broken, rhythmic brushwork. By the 1880s, his paintings started selling; Pissarro accused him of commercialism, and younger painters called him passé, for he remained loyal to the Impressionists' early goal of capturing the transitory effects of nature through direct observation.  In 1890 he began creating paintings in series, depicting the same subject under various conditions and at different times of the day. His late pictures, made when he was half-blind, are shimmering pools of color almost totally devoid of form.

Although painted in his studio, this still life shows the influence of the outdoor experiments that Claude Monet undertook in the summer and fall of 1869, while he was living at Bougival on the Seine River. His exercises in different painting techniques are seen in the way he softened the outlines of forms and the manner in which he explored the descriptive possibilities of brushstrokes: broad and flat in the tablecloth, sketchy in the apples, and short and dense in the flower petals. Monet's technique is also apparent in the use of light to animate the surfaces of the flowers, fruit, and tablecloth and in the way the colors are affected by the light, by reflections, and by each other. These pictorial innovations became the foundation for the development of the Impressionist technique in the decades that followed.

This piece was chosen due to the vibrancy of the painting. Unlike some other paintings, the piece calls the viewer’s attention with the bright color and beautiful arrangement. This piece also engages the viewer’s senses by making one almost smell flowers and taste the fresh summer fruit on a bright day. There seems to be an abundance which may call the viewer to think of prosperous times of plenty. There’s some symbolism that can be taken away by interpretation, which is key for a simple still life such as this one. I enjoy the works which bring a calming sense with them such as this one, where many still lifes are dark, this is bright and soft. It is wonderful when one can be called by beauty such as this one does, it shows the beauty first and the meaning second which is why it was picked for the gallery.