Still Life with Apples and Pears

This 1871 still-life at the William Morris Gallery was painted while Courbet was imprisoned following the Paris Commune, in which he had played a significant public role as a member of the Commune's arts commission. Unable to paint outdoors, he turned to still-life subjects — fruit, flowers, and simple objects — that could be assembled within his cell. Still-lifes of apples and pears from this period carry a particular poignancy: they represent Courbet's determination to continue painting under radically constrained circumstances, and their modest, concentrated quality is quite different from the expansive ambition of his pre-Commune landscapes and figure paintings. The William Morris Gallery in London holds this work in unusual institutional context — a gallery devoted to the designer and social reformer, whose values resonated with the Realist programme Courbet represented.

The prison still-lifes are typically smaller in format than Courbet's pre-Commune work, their compositions concentrated on a single group of fruit with minimal background. The paint handling retains his characteristic directness but within a compressed scale, the fruit surfaces built up with the same impasto certainty as his great rock faces.