Bowl, Figs, and Apples
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
AUGUSTE RENOIR, 1916. OIL ON CANVAS.
More than eight hundred canvases were left in the artist’s studio after his death, in various stages of completion, and this was one of them. Cut from a larger study that contained multiple variations of a similar composition, this small rectangular still life was mounted alone as a work worthy of its own frame. The fruit seems almost alive, so ripe and ready to eat that each individual fig and apple casts a halo of freshness around itself as if inviting the viewer to reach through the oil and grab it. All of which is in sharp contrast to the dainty porcelain of the bowl in the middle, the handles protruding with delicacy outwards to the scene of objects it cannot hold. When Renoir painted this work, his arthritis had become debilitating and his technique was a world away from the one he had used as a young man. The vivid and broad brushstrokes came not, initially, from aesthetic choice but from necessity as it changed his visual language to one he was physically able to achieve. Yet the strange paradox at the heart of it seems to be that as Renoir aged, his works took on a vitality and virility that imbues them with youth and energy far above any of his earlier paintings.