Edouard Manet - Basket of Fruits 1864 |
Eva Gonzalès 1849 – 1883. French painter known for her depictions of contemporary Parisian life and an aesthetic that reflects the strong influence of her mentor, Édouard Manet. ArtsViewer.com |
From Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:
This slight still-life composition served as a pretext for Manet to demonstrate his daring technical innovations. Single brushstrokes, applied wet in wet, evoke the velvet sheen of a peach, the dusky skin of a plum, the ripe form of a fig, the glint of a knife handle. These strokes are in fact so loose and summary that the painting has sometimes been called a study, though no “finished” version of the composition is known. Manet considered this picture sufficiently finished to include it in his first one-man exhibition in 1867.