Oranges, Bananas, and Teacup (Oranges, bananes et tasse de thé)

Oranges, Bananas, and Teacup, 1908, is one of Renoir's late Cagnes still lifes in which tropical fruit — grown or easily available in the Mediterranean south — appears alongside the domestic paraphernalia of French bourgeois life. The combination of oranges and bananas with a teacup is characteristically Renoir in its easy juxtaposition of the exotic and the everyday: these are not the carefully arranged vanitas compositions of the Dutch tradition but simple accumulations of objects pleasant to paint. By 1908 his arthritis had made complex compositions physically difficult, and the small still life — a few objects on a surface — offered a format that could be painted without moving from his chair. Cézanne, who had died in 1906, had made the still life a vehicle for his most advanced structural investigation; Renoir's contemporary still lifes approach the same objects from a purely sensory direction, interested in warmth, colour, and texture rather than geometric structure. The contrast between the two painters' treatments of fruit epitomises their fundamental artistic difference.

Renoir treats the warm orange and yellow fruit with his characteristic rounded, softly modelled brushwork, setting saturated colour against the neutral tones of a tablecloth or surface. The teacup provides a cool ceramic note that offsets the fruit's warmth. The handling is relaxed and fluid, consistent with his late manner.