桃の入った壺

Monet was 26 in 1866 and had just had his first real success, a full-length portrait of Camille Doncieux in a green striped dress that the Salon took and the critics wrote about. Money did not follow. He spent the late summer with his family at Sainte-Adresse, on the coast outside Le Havre, and this still life comes from around then.

A still life was the practical thing to paint. Cheap to set up, easier to sell than a large figure piece, and it stayed where you put it. What he did with it was what he did outdoors, treating the jar as a set of optical problems, the preserved peaches bending through the curved glass, the light skidding off a polished marble slab, the white cloth throwing colour back up into the glass.

Dresden bought the picture in 1927 from a Berlin dealer, and it hangs in the Albertinum.