Still Life: Apples and Pears in a Round Basket

Pissarro painted this basket of fruit in 1872, and he almost never painted still lifes, which makes the quiet subject worth pausing on. The two years before had been the worst of his life. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 he fled to London, and Prussian soldiers took over his house at Louveciennes and destroyed most of the paintings he had left behind, years of work gone. Back in France, he settled his family at Pontoise, a town on the Oise north of Paris, and slowly began again. That same year the younger Cézanne, who looked up to Pissarro almost as a father, came to Pontoise to paint beside him. The dealer Durand-Ruel bought this canvas straight from Pissarro in 1872, one of the first sales that helped him climb back. He signed and dated it in red in the upper right corner.