Natura morta con mele

This little still life hangs in what was once Renoir's own home, the house called Les Collettes at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France. He settled there in 1907 and lived out his last years among its olive trees, painting almost to the day he died in 1919. By then his hands were badly crippled by arthritis, and the brush sometimes had to be wedged between his fingers, yet he never stopped reaching for warm, glowing colour. A handful of apples was the kind of simple, close-at-hand subject he could come back to endlessly, turning ordinary fruit into rounded shapes flushed with red and gold.