Grappe de raisins

A single cluster of white chasselas grapes hangs from a bare vine stem against a bright blue sky, the translucent berries catching the light with the plain, direct honesty that marks the still lifes of Courbet’s later years. Painted in 1871, at the end of a career devoted to the unidealised truth of what the eye sees, the little canvas sets one fragment of the vineyard against open air and makes a whole world of it — Realism reduced to a single luminous bunch of fruit. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.