Still Life with Melon (Nature morte au melon)

Still Life with Melon (Nature morte au melon), 1905, is a late Cagnes fruit still life in which the melon's warm yellow-green exterior and rich orange interior provided Renoir with a natural colour range spanning the warmest zone of his preferred palette. The melon as a southern fruit — grown across Provence in summer — was both literally available at Les Collettes and aesthetically appropriate to his late chromatic concerns: warm, rounded, sensuous, visually rich. His fruit still lifes of the Cagnes period should be understood alongside his figure paintings as explorations of the same fundamental interest in warm colour, rounded form, and light on curved surfaces. The same curved brushwork that models the female body also models the melon's round sides; the same interest in warm shadow and luminous highlight animates both subjects. Cézanne, who had died in 1906, had produced monumental still lifes treating fruit as occasions for structural analysis; Renoir's contemporary treatment of the same subjects represents the antithetical approach — all sensation, no architecture.

The melon's warm ochre-green exterior and rich orange-yellow interior provide a natural colour range that Renoir explores with soft, rounded strokes. Shadows under and beside the fruit are warm purples and red-browns rather than cool greys, maintaining the overall warm tonality he preferred.