Still Life with Pumpkin, Pears and Walnuts

A squash, a few pears, some walnuts, laid out on a bare surface. Squash had crossed from the Americas two centuries earlier, and by the 1750s, when Ceruti painted this, it grew in every field corner of the Lombard plain. It was food you ate because it was cheap and because it kept through the winter. Pears and walnuts come off the trees in the same few autumn weeks and cost about as little. Ceruti was in the last stretch of his working life here, and he gave this cheap produce the same close, patient light he gave to the faces of the poor. The canvas is small, 43 centimetres by 59, and it hangs in room XXXVI at Brera.