Still life with fruit

The story behind Still life with fruit

The still life has a long and serious history. The Dutch masters of the seventeenth century elevated it to an art form of extraordinary ambition — surfaces rendered with impossible fidelity, light caught in glass and reflected from silver, the textures of skin and peel and leaf described with a precision that still astonishes. That tradition has been a source of admiration since childhood.

This small painting is a first venture into the genre. Fresh fruit arranged on a glass plate against a dark ground — a cut orange, strawberries, grapes. The glass plate presented the real challenge: the reflections, the distortions, the way the fruit reads through the bowl. These are exactly the problems the Dutch masters solved three hundred and fifty years ago, and they remain just as demanding today.

Source image of realism painting Still life with fruit