Description
Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Still Life with Apples and Almonds
| Year of creation: | undated |
| Original size: | 43.5 cm x 20.5 cm |
| Painting style: | Impressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | in the custody of the Musée d’Orsay (MNR), shown at the musée Renoir, Cagnes-sur-Mer |
| Image source: | Pierre-Auguste Renoir / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified (cropped and resized) |
On a narrow canvas, almost twice as wide as it is tall, a group of fruit lies on a table. Five red-orange apples are spread across the centre, with pale green almonds among and around them. At the right a green leaf reaches past the edge. The ground is a single warm ochre plane without detail, and the signature is painted in the lower right corner.
The work is undated. The format is unusually elongated: it presses the fruit into a single horizontal band and forces the pieces to touch, and it is that crowding which gives the still life its tension. The paint is thinly laid, so that in places the weave of the canvas and the warm underpainting show through.
The original measures 43.5 cm x 20.5 cm and is oil on canvas. It is recorded under inventory number MNR 683: a work recovered after the Second World War and returned to France, whose rightful owner has not been established. The French state therefore holds it in custody until the question of ownership is resolved.
Our version is a hand-painted oil reproduction on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually to order, so no two are exactly alike. It is available in eight wide sizes, from 90 x 43 cm to 180 x 85 cm. It is a painting in oils, not a print.
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