Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate

Dutch painters of the 17th century liked to slip a bruised or rotting fruit into a still life, a reminder that everything decays. Courbet's apples have their flaws too, lumpy, thick-skinned, spotted with bruises, and the National Gallery reads them the other way round, as fruit worth looking at for its own sake. He painted them while he was a prisoner, held in Paris for his part in the Commune of 1871 and forbidden to use models, so he painted what could be brought to him. The heavy earthenware bowl is lined with pale blue slip. A single pomegranate sits low in the heap, two more wait on the brown oak table, and behind them a pewter coffee pot catches the light beside a glass of red wine.