Still Life with Bowl and Fruits

By 1886, the year this was painted, Impressionism was quietly coming apart. That spring the group held its eighth and last show together, and a young painter named Seurat took over a room with tiny dots of pure colour, a method the critics were already calling Neo-Impressionism. Schuffenecker hung nine works in that same exhibition, several still lifes among them, and this bowl of fruit shows exactly where he stood. He had learned the divided touch from Seurat's circle, though he never pushed it to the strictness of the dot. Look at how the strokes change size and direction across the cloth and the fruit, pinks and cool greens set side by side rather than blended. He kept a few paintings by Cézanne at home, the painter who had made this plain arrangement of fruit on a table his own ground.