Plate of Peaches

In 1882 Caillebotte was 34 and doing two jobs at once. He painted, and he kept the Impressionists going, paying for the rooms of their seventh group show that spring, hanging it himself, and buying his friends' canvases when almost nobody else would. Around those same years he made a run of pictures of food as a Paris shopper met it, fruit laid out in rows on a market stall, cuts of meat in a butcher's window. This plate of peaches sits at the quiet, domestic end of that series. He had written his will while still in his 20s, leaving his Monets, Renoirs and Degas to the French state, and when he died suddenly in 1894, at 45, officials spent years arguing over how much of the collection they were willing to hang.