The Apple Seller

In June 1896 the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel sold this canvas to Harry Kessler, a 28-year-old German count living in Berlin who was buying new French painting for himself. Durand-Ruel had bought it straight from Renoir in November 1891. The scene was probably painted around 1890 at Essoyes, in eastern France. A country girl bends with a basket of apples towards a woman in white, whom the Cleveland Museum of Art identifies as Renoir's wife, Aline. The boy in the straw hat may be the painter's nephew Edmond, while the little girl in red has never been named. Down at the bottom a small dog looks up at the basket. After Kessler the picture went to a collector in Geneva and then a New York dealer, and in 1958 the Cleveland collector Leonard Hanna left it to the museum.