Apples, Oranges, Pears and Art
Works by Pissarro, Cézanne and Other Fruitful Painters
© Meg Nola
Apr 7, 2009
For centuries, capturing the colorful beauty of fruit has intrigued artists — or if not intrigued, then been foisted upon them in obligatory still life exercises. Whether the resulting works show fruit in bowls or baskets, placed upon tables, sliced, lying under trees or nestled in wooden crates, truly great painters are always able to elevate the commonplace into extraordinary art.
Pissarro’s Apple Picking and Apples in a Hat by Levi Wells Prentice
Beginning with apples — the fruit of the Garden of Eden — French Impressionist pioneer Camille Pissarro presented a gorgeous view of a man and three women at work picking apples in the sun. Pissarro’s 1888 Apple Picking at Eragny-sur Epte introduced such modern elements as finely-gathered points of color and an unusually posed, almost dancer-like girl bending down to loosen stiff muscles or reach for fallen fruit. The man pokes at the highest branches with a pole while the women fill their baskets beneath a tree that rises crookedly then casts dappled shadows on the ground below.
Newly-gathered fruit also fills Levi Wells Prentice’s 1891 Still Life of Apples in a Hat. A self-taught artist, Wells Prentice made his own brushes and worked mostly in the upstate New York and Pennsylvania region. He was careful to include realistic detail in his paintings, such as the minor imperfections of these apples which only add to their natural beauty.
Woman with an Orange
Another popular still life fruit would be the orange, which inspired striking works by artists Edouard Manet (Four Mandarin Oranges) and Vincent van Gogh (Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges) — among many others. A particularly alluring orange-related painting that doesn’t involve still life views is Woman with an Orange by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911). Lefebvre was one of the major figure painters of his day, and his temptingly half-peeled orange is offered here by an alluring woman with gold hoop earrings, her smile mysterious and her dark hair covered with a veil-life scarf.
Moser’s Three Red-Yellow Pears and Cézanne’s Still Life
Austrian Koloman Moser’s Fruit Bowl with Three Red-Yellow Pears centers vivid, upright fruits before a stark window. Moser (1868-1918) was a founder of the famed Wiener Werkstätte movement, which was committed to combining both accessibility and quality in artistic and design efforts. Their work included furniture, jewelry, pottery and textiles, and the pedestal bowl holding the pears in Moser’s painting along with the underlying tablecloth are also notable and suggest his expanded talents.
Continuing on within the realm of pears, the great Paul Cézanne opted for a curious arrangement of a skull surrounded by fruit in his Still Life with Skull (circa 1895-1900). Cézanne used the skull motif in other works as well, with its presence usually signifying the concept of human mortality. Skulls were also found in paintings by Spanish masters El Greco and Francisco de Zurbarán, and Cézanne was no doubt carrying on their symbolism in his own art.
Cézanne was quite fond of the still life form and produced many examples of his skill, with another reason being that he generally didn’t like to work with live models. He found people to be too impatient while people in turn found him too demanding; and therefore perhaps the head of a skeleton was the easiest human element for Cézanne to tolerate. His pears here are full and appealing, the foreboding skull having little effect on their freshness — or maybe through its deathly presence making the fruit seem even more deliciously ripe.
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