Натюрморт с дыней

We think of Monet outdoors, chasing light on water and haystacks, so a tabletop of fruit comes as a small surprise. He painted this in 1872, the year he settled at Argenteuil on the Seine, just as the loose, bright manner soon to be called Impressionism was taking shape. Here he brings those lessons indoors. A cut melon, peaches and a scatter of grapes sit against blue-and-white porcelain, the warm fruit playing off the cool ceramic and a pale wall. The melon's rind is built up in thick, buttery paint. Monet came back to melons in still lifes at the end of the 1870s, but this early one now hangs far from France, in the Gulbenkian collection in Lisbon.