Still Life with Lemons

The full French title of this still life is nearly a sentence. It speaks of lemons whose forms correspond to those of a black vase drawn on the wall, and the painting shows exactly that. The vase at upper right, drawn in black on a pale panel, swells like the fruit, and its neck and foot return in the stem of the blue glass dish at lower left. A book on the green ground has one word, Tapis, French for carpets, and its edge lines up with the red wedge under the single lemon. Painted in 1914, the canvas was shown at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1919, then went to Léopold Zborowski, the dealer best known for selling Modigliani, and reached New York by 1923. In 1939 the New York collector Edith Wetmore gave it to the museum.