Cebollas

Renoir reached Naples in November 1881 and stayed almost two months, longer than anywhere else on his Italian journey. He had gone to Italy for Raphael and saw him, but the thing that unsettled him was in Naples itself, the Roman wall paintings lifted out of Pompeii and Herculaneum and set up in the museum there, flat, rapid, unfussy and still bright after 18 centuries. He wrote home that what he wanted now was the grandeur and simplicity of the old painters.

The onions and heads of garlic tipped out on a crumpled cloth were painted on that stay. Sterling Clark, the American heir who ended up owning more than 30 Renoirs, said this small still life was his favourite of the lot, and it hangs in the museum he built at Williamstown in Massachusetts.