Melon

A melon set in a shallow dish, a bowl of figs beside it, the table tipped up toward the viewer and its edges cut away by the frame. Caillebotte painted it in 1882, on a canvas of 54 by 65 centimetres, during the few years when he kept coming back to fruit and food on a table rather than to the Paris streets he is remembered for. The picture passed much later to Oscar Ghez, an industrialist born in Tunis who built up a large collection of French painting and opened it in Geneva in 1968 as his own museum, the Petit Palais. That museum closed in September 2000, two years after he died, and the melon has been seen since only when the collection lends it out.