Apple Vendor (La Marchande de pommes)

Apple Vendor (La Marchande de pommes), 1890, depicts a market seller of fruit in a subject that sits between genre painting and the figure studies that dominated Renoir's mature production. The subject had different associations for different Impressionist painters: Pissarro, who came from a family of Caribbean merchants and had a more politically conscious view of labour, painted market vendors and peasant women with an attention to their working conditions and social dignity that Renoir consciously avoided. For Renoir, the apple seller is primarily a figure study opportunity — warm flesh and hair tones against the cool greens and reds of the fruit, a compositional problem of integrating person and produce into a warm, pleasant whole. This ideological difference between Renoir and his colleagues was explicit: he famously declared that he painted 'pretty things,' a position that has attracted feminist criticism but reflects a genuine, if limited, aesthetic philosophy about the purposes of painting.

The figure is set against a loosely painted background with Renoir's warm, rounded brushwork modelling the seller's face and arms. The apples are treated as compact colour notes—warm reds and yellows—arranged to create a still-life element within the figure composition.