The artwork “Still Life Apples, Pears and Flowers on a Table, Saint Pelagie” is an oil on canvas painting by Gustave Courbet, created in 1871. This piece exemplifies the Realism art movement and is classified under the still life genre. Currently, the artwork is housed at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, CA, US, showcasing Courbet’s meticulous attention to depicting everyday subjects with a strong sense of reality and texture.
This particular still life by Courbet presents a textured and richly colored assembly of fruit and flowers. The composition features a bounty of apples and pears, some heaped while others are scattered loosely across a table surface. Among the fruits, there’s a noticeable interplay of warm sunlit hues and cooler shaded areas, creating a vivid sense of three-dimensional form and weight. Adding to the organic abundance, a pot of white and pale violet flowers stands to the side, lending vertical balance to the otherwise horizontal arrangement of fruits.
In the background, dark tones obscure any definite sense of place, drawing the viewer’s focus to the interplay of light and color on the fruits and flowers themselves. A hint of a reddish drape or fabric on the right adds a contrasting touch of color to the predominantly yellow and green shades of the fruits and the natural earthen tones of the pot. Carefully executed brushwork and subtle variations in texture not only lend the fruits and flowers a tangible quality but also reflect Courbet’s dedication to capturing spatial and material authenticity, congruent with the Realism movement’s ideology.
