Still Life with Basket of Apples

A basket of apples sits on a plain wooden block, and nothing else competes with it. It is woven in thick flat braids, and Punz follows every turn of them. Beside it, on a white cloth with an embroidered hem, lies an apple cut in half to show its core, and another partly peeled, its red skin curling down over the fold. That hanging peel is an old device of Dutch still-life painters, who a century earlier had let the rind of a lemon spill over a table edge in the same way. A strong light from one side throws a dark shadow across the wood. Punz was in her early thirties when she painted it, and she signed and dated it low on the block, just past the edge of the linen.