PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Still-life occupies a prominent position in Renoir's work from the early 1880s onward. Among the most academic of the Impressionists—a position he shared with Paul Cézanne, another devotee of the still-life subject—Renoir is frequently remembered as a painter of the female figure. Although he recommended to Edouard Manet's niece Julie to paint still-life “in order to teach yourself to paint quickly” (quoted in J. Manet, Journal, 1893-1899, Paris, no date, p. 190), the numerous works, often elaborate and ambitious, which Renoir executed in this genre over the course of his career attest to his sustained interest in still-life as an end in itself. Indeed, it was in his still-life compositions that Renoir pursued some of his most searching investigations of the effects of light and color on objects and surfaces.
As with Cézanne, the masters of French eighteenth-century painting exerted a strong pull on Renoir. While his figure pictures looked towards Jean-Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, his still-lifes found their inspiration in Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's unique vision. Discussing Renoir's pictorial dialogue with Chardin, Charles Sterling has rendered a statement of Renoir's achievement in still-life which could well describe the present painting: “Nurtured on the traditions of eighteenth-century French painting, Renoir made no attempt to energize his compositions, as Monet did, but carried on the serene simplicity of Chardin...Pale shadows, light as a breath of air, faintly ripple across the perishable jewel of a ripe fruit. Renoir reconciles extreme discretion with extreme richness, and his full-bodied density is made up, it would seem, of coloured air. This is a lyrical idiom hitherto unknown in still life, even in those of Chardin. Between these objects and us there floats a luminous haze through which we distinguish them, tenderly united in a subdued shimmer of light” (C. Sterling, Still Life in Painting from Antiquity to the Present Time, Paris, 1959, p. 100).