Oranges and Bananas (Oranges et bananes)

Oranges and Bananas of 1913 belongs to Renoir's sustained late campaign of tropical fruit still lifes at Cagnes, where the Mediterranean climate made such fruits locally grown and immediately available. The combination of orange and banana was a calculated chromatic pairing: the deep warm orange against the cooler yellow-green of the banana skin explored the rich range of warm hues between yellow and red-orange that particularly interested his late palette. Renoir had been painting fruit since the 1870s, but the late Cagnes fruit paintings are more freely handled and more purely sensory than the careful middle-period compositions. That he continued such still-life work in 1913 — when arthritis had so deformed his hands that he painted with brushes secured to his wrists — suggests both the physical accessibility of still-life subjects (which could be set up close to his wheelchair and painted without the demands of figure management) and his genuine continued pleasure in the chromatic possibilities of fresh fruit. The Barnes Foundation's multiple late fruit canvases from 1910 to 1914 document this sustained engagement as a distinct late sub-genre.

The complementary relationship between orange and yellow-green banana skin provides the chromatic tension in this composition. Renoir builds the fruit's rounded forms with soft, curved strokes following their surface contours, using warmer tones for the lit surfaces and purple-brown shadows for the receding planes.