Pomegranates (Grenades)

Pomegranates of 1910 belongs to Renoir's late exploration of Mediterranean fruits at Cagnes, where the pomegranate — a fruit associated with classical antiquity, with the myths of Persephone and the Greek world, and with the warm Mediterranean culture he had embraced — held both aesthetic and symbolic resonance. The pomegranate's exterior color — deep crimson-red shifting toward orange-red — was closely related to his late warm palette, and the fruit's distinctive crown-like calyx and rough, leathery skin offered textural variety alongside its chromatic richness. Unlike the smooth apple or orange, the pomegranate required more varied brushwork to describe its complex surface character. Renoir had painted fruit since the 1870s but the late Cagnes fruit paintings — beginning around 1908 to 1910 — formed a distinct group of southern Mediterranean subjects that drew on the same warm landscape and light he was painting in his late landscape canvases. The Barnes Foundation acquired several late Renoir fruit canvases from 1910 as demonstrations of his sustained still-life intelligence alongside his better-known figure and landscape work.

The pomegranate's distinctive form and colour—deep russet exterior, intense crimson interior—required specific treatment distinct from his rounder apple or orange painting. Renoir builds the smooth exterior with broadly curved strokes in warm ochre-red, while any visible interior is rendered with intense, jewel-like crimson marks.