Basket of Fruits

Edouard Manet

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Keywords: BasketFruits

Work Overview

Basket of Fruits
Edouard Manet
Date: c.1864; Paris, France *
Style: Realism
Genre: still life
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 44.4 x 37.8 cm
Location: Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, MA, US


This slight still-life composition served as a pretext for Manet to demonstrate his daring technical innovations. Single brushstrokes, applied wet in wet, evoke the velvet sheen of a peach, the dusky skin of a plum, the ripe form of a fig, the glint of a knife handle. These strokes are in fact so loose and summary that the painting has sometimes been called a study, though no “finished” version of the composition is known. Manet considered this picture sufficiently finished to include it in his first one-man exhibition in 1867.