Edouard Manet

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.