Still Life with Melon (Nature morte au melon)

Still Life with Melon, 1905, belongs to Renoir's late series of summer fruit still lifes produced at Cagnes-sur-Mer and reflects the abundance of southern French produce available to him in his final home. The melon—a Provençal summer fruit with a warm golden interior—was an inherently attractive subject for a painter of warm, saturated colour, and Renoir treats it with the same sensuous attention he gave to female figures. Barnes acquired fruit still lifes as demonstrations of Renoir's colour intelligence in its most concentrated form, stripped of narrative or compositional complexity.

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.