Still Life with Fruit and Wine Jug

Fruit is heaped against a tall wine jug on a table, the whole surface worked in thick, glinting touches of rose, amber, green and gold so dense that the little panel glows like enamel. Adolphe Monticelli painted this still life in 1874, in the Marseille years after his return from Paris, when his brushwork grew ever more freely encrusted and his colour ever more jewelled; the young Vincent van Gogh, who revered him, wrote that he sometimes felt he was continuing Monticelli’s work, and the older painter’s Provençal palette echoes across van Gogh’s own still lifes. The picture was with Jacques Blot in Paris, passed in 1952 to E. J. van Wisselingh in Amsterdam and in 1953 to Paul Rosenberg in New York, and was bought the same year by Mary and Leigh Block of Chicago, who gave it to the Art Institute. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.