Still Life with Peaches

Peaches piled high in a white porcelain bowl, a handful of pears resting on the crumpled cloth beside them — an intimate still life set against a rich, patterned tapestry wall. Auguste Renoir painted it in 1881, in the years of his great figure pictures, when his handling of fruit and fabric was as assured as his handling of the human figure; the cobalt-decorated bowl shows his taste for Japanese ceramics. The painting is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.