Basket of Plums

A shallow wicker basket overflows with ripe purple plums on a stone ledge, the glossy fruit catching the light against a warm brown ground. Anne Vallayer-Coster — the young painter who astonished the Paris Salon and was championed by Marie Antoinette — brings an intimate, tactile beauty to the humblest of subjects, the plums rendered with such sensuous precision that you can almost feel their bloom.