#fruit

He painted apples over and over for most of his working life, dozens of times. The line everyone quotes is that he meant to astonish Paris with one — though nobody seems certain he ever actually said it.

By this point he'd left France for the Pacific for good and was painting what was around him — the fruit and the birds are local ones. According to Wikipedia he was broke and in bad health through most of those last years, shipping canvases back to dealers in Paris and hoping.

Putting fruit on its own, with no story around it, was apparently a fairly new thing to do — fruit usually turned up in the corner of a picture about something else. People also point out that the leaves are blotchy and one apple has a wormhole; nobody seems sure whether that was deliberate or just what happened to be on the table that day.

The same jugs, cloths and bowls turn up in dozens of these — a table set up indoors and gone at for weeks on end. He worked so slowly, it's said, that the fruit went off before he was done, so he took to using wax ones.

Caravaggio painted the fruit with real bruises and worm holes, they say, instead of prettying it up like most painters did then — some think that basket's actually the point, not the boy.

A skull sitting in with the fruit was an old convention — the reminder that you and the pears are both on the clock. He reportedly kept a couple of them in his studio and came back to painting them near the end of his life.

This whole series was apparently made as a diplomatic gift for an emperor, with each season meant to stand for a stage of a life - summer being someone in their prime. Look closely at the woven collar and there's said to be a name stitched right into the wheat.

This one was made for a cardinal, from what I've read - and apparently some of the fruit in the bowl is already turning, which people take as a nod to how fast all this will fade.