リンゴと洋梨

Renoir made his name painting people, dances, boating parties, crowds in dappled sun. But in the 1890s, in his fifties and increasingly troubled by the arthritis that would slowly cripple his hands, he turned often to the quiet of still life. A plate of a few pears and an apple on a rumpled blue and white cloth: it looks simple, yet the careful folds and the weighing of each fruit against the next owe a clear debt to his old friend Paul Cezanne, who had spent years making apples the most serious subject in painting. The two men had worked side by side in the south of France. The canvas later passed to the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, and hangs today in his old collection at the Orangerie, not far from Monet's water lilies.