Fruit in Still-Life Painting: From Pompeii to Cézanne, and How to Color It

A bowl of fruit on a table is one of the oldest and most patient subjects in art. It keeps still, it is made of simple round shapes, and its colors change where the light falls and where it doesn't. daubday's Fruit theme is a small, flat descendant of that tradition. Here is where it comes from and what it teaches about light and color.

Fruit on Roman walls

Roman houses were already decorated with food and tableware. Wall paintings and floor mosaics found at Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villa Boscoreale show such objects with a real sense of depth, including a glass bowl of fruit, a motif painters returned to for centuries. One painting of it from Pompeii, made around 70 AD, is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. In wealthy homes, mosaics of food also served as signs of hospitality and as celebrations of the seasons.

The Dutch still life and its meanings

Still life became a separate kind of painting in the Low Countries in the last quarter of the 16th century, and the English term comes from the Dutch word stilleven. Painters there developed several types:

• Breakfast pieces show a few delicacies on a table, both a display of fine food and a reminder to avoid gluttony.
• Pronkstilleven, or showy still lifes, pile up fruit, flowers and silver to show abundance.
• Vanitas paintings set rich objects beside a skull, an hourglass or a candle burning down, as reminders that pleasures pass. Fruit and flowers were sometimes shown just starting to spoil or wilt to make the same point.

Many still lifes, though, were made simply to show skill and to be enjoyed.

Cézanne's apples

In the late 19th century, Paul Cézanne turned the fruit bowl into a laboratory. He arranged apples, pears, jugs and plates in his studio and painted them again and again. The Basket of Apples, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the best known. He did not follow strict perspective. A pear might be painted oversized because the composition needed its weight. Instead of smooth shading, he built each fruit from separate dabs of color. The painter Émile Bernard wrote that Cézanne began with the shadow parts and laid patch upon patch until the colors modelled the object. Cézanne advised treating nature through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, and his still lifes led directly to Cubism.

Still lifes in Korea

Korea has its own paintings of arranged objects. Chaekgeori, pictures of books and scholarly things, flourished from the second half of the 18th century with the support of King Jeongjo, and some borrowed Western perspective and shading. In the late Joseon period, the painter Jang Seung-eop shaped gimyeong jeolji painting, which pairs old bronze vessels and ceramics with flowering branches, fruit and vegetables chosen for wishes such as wealth, long life and many sons.

What a bowl of fruit teaches about light

Painters see a lit, round object as a few zones: the side facing the light, the side turning into shadow, a small highlight where light reflects, and a shadow cast on the table. Cézanne's patches show that you don't need smooth blending to make an apple look round, only the right flat colors placed side by side.

Color by number works the same way. Every area is one flat color, and any sense of light comes from lighter and darker areas sitting next to each other. The color basics guide explains why this light-and-dark contrast, called value, matters.

To see it with your own fruit, photograph a bowl lit from one side by a window and turn it into a puzzle on the My photo page. The app groups similar colors, so each fruit's shading becomes a few bands from light to shadow, and more colors keep more of those steps. The photo settings guide has starting points for food.

How daubday's fruit pictures are built

Every Fruit picture is generated from a seed and has the same parts:

• A wall, plain or patterned with stripes, dots, checks or a few other designs, above a table that runs across the lower part.
• A wide bowl in the middle, its rim in one color and its body in another.
• Three or four fruits in a row on the rim, chosen from an apple, an orange, a pear and a bunch of grapes, each at most once.
• A round shape high on the wall in one upper corner. Pictures may be mirrored, so it can be on either side.

Most fruit pictures have fewer than 30 areas, so the gallery usually labels them Easy.

Tips for coloring the Fruit theme

• Don't expect natural colors. Each picture takes its colors from one of several palettes, so your orange may be blue and your apple cream. Follow the numbers.
• Fill the big areas first. The wall, the table and the bowl's body go quickly. Wall patterns reuse the table's color, and sometimes the rim's, so one number can reach all three.
• Collect the rim pieces. The fruits sit on the rim, so it shows as several small slivers between and beside them, all with one number.
• Tap the grapes once. The grapes are overlapping circles of one color, so in nearly every picture the whole bunch is a single area.
• Find the apple's spot. A small round spot near the top of the apple sits where a painter would put a highlight, and it almost always shares its number with the circle on the wall. In some of the simplest pictures it is merged into the apple.
• Zoom in for the smallest parts. Stems are so thin that they are usually merged into the areas around them. Leaves and the dot on top of the orange often survive as tiny areas whose numbers appear once you zoom in.