Still Life with Fruit and Wine Jug

Painted in 1874 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this rich still life by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli—the Marseille-born painter who was a direct forerunner of Van Gogh—shows his characteristic transformation of the traditional still-life into a vehicle for impastoed, jewel-like color. Monticelli painted fruit and wine vessels with a thickly encrusted technique that Van Gogh admired deeply when he discovered the older painter's work in Paris in 1886. The combination of fruit and wine jug has centuries of still-life precedent, but Monticelli's treatment is less about the objects' reality than their transformation into pure chromatic matter.

Monticelli builds up the fruit and wine jug through heavy impasto—thick ridges and swirls of paint applied with brush or palette knife—that gives the surface a encrusted, almost jeweled quality. His palette of deep reds, golds, and warm browns applied against darker grounds creates the glowing, luminous effect that so impressed Van Gogh when he encountered this work.