The Basket of Apples

In March 1883 Monet had one of his first solo shows, 56 canvases at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery on the Boulevard de la Madeleine in Paris. Sales were poor, and in letters to the dealer he called it a fiasco. One reviewer saw it differently. Gustave Geffroy, a young critic writing for the paper La Justice, singled out the still lifes, this basket among them. The apples, he wrote, round and hard and filling the basket well, play the role of lanterns, as if lit from within. Monet had painted it three years earlier at Vétheuil, in a season of fruit and flower pieces, and signed and dated it in the upper right corner. Durand-Ruel bought it in 1896, and his family kept it for more than a century, until it was sold at Christie's in New York in 2005.