Basket of Fruit by Edouard Manet Magnet

Basket of Fruit by Edouard Manet, oil on canvas c. 1864, is a still life painting of a woven basket on a wooden table with a small pile of fruit and a knife. Painted in broad, fluid brush strokes of deftly applied oil paint, the painting exemplifies the flattened form and emphasis on the picture plane that Manet pioneered. Against the brushy, grey and brown table and background the forms of the apples, peaches and fruit sing in clear notes of colour, particularly the icy violet tone of the plum. Harking back to the realism and vivacious brush work of Franz Hals and the Little Dutch Masters, as well as the painterly qualities of Rococo realists such as Chardin, the still life marks the beginning of many of the concerns of modern painting. Edouard Manet (1832 - 1883) was a French realist painter and one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement whose controversial paintings marked the founding of modern art. Pursuing art at a young age, Manet studied for 6 years under the academic painter Thomas Couture, and on trips abroad encountered the Dutch masters as well as the Spanish painters Velazquez and Goya. Opening his own studio in Paris, Manet produced many paintings under the influence of the Realism of Courbet, painting scenes from modern life. His masterpieces Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia of 1863 aroused great controversy, and though the artist continued to exhibit in the official Paris Salon he befriended Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other key Impressionist painters. Painting in a loose, sketchy manner of painterly brush strokes and flattened forms which some found to be unfinished, Manet produced many scenes of bohemian cafe nightlife, journalistic scenes of wars and current events, as well subjects from the streets of Paris with such a spontaneity and compositional innovation that they made a lasting influence on younger generations of artists and enshrined him as the true "painter of modern life". Though the artist died young, Manet created paintings that were the lodestone and rallying point for the school of Impressionism and the founders of modern painting.