Pears and Grapes

Monet signed this still life and dated it 1880 in the upper left corner. The Hamburger Kunsthalle places it in October of that year, when he was living at Vétheuil, a village on the Seine downstream from Paris. The museum points to the way it loosens the conventions of the genre. The table is turned at an angle, and the white cloth fills the whole width of the canvas and tips up toward the viewer, carrying pears, apples and bunches of pale and dark grapes on a bed of green leaves. Two red apples sit apart in the lower right, each throwing a blue shadow on the cloth. In 1896 a Hamburg society of art lovers, the Verein von Kunstfreunden von 1870, bought the picture from the Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and gave it to the Kunsthalle.