A bowl of fruit looks like the most harmless subject in painting. Yet painters have used it to talk about sin, death, prison and money.
Even the most familiar fruit in art rests on a guess: the Bible never says that the fruit Eve offered Adam was an apple.
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How These Were Chosen
Before it carried any of these meanings, fruit was a convenient model. A bowl of apples keeps its pose for days, then ripens, bruises and rots, and painters watched that change as closely as its color.
Religion then loaded the same fruit with stories, from the tree of Eden to the Passion, the suffering and death of Christ. Two fruits return more than any others in the paintings below, the apple five times and the pomegranate four, and their meaning changes from one painter to the next.
12. Adriaen Coorte, Gooseberries on a Table (1701)
In Gooseberries on a Table, painted in 1701 by the Dutch painter Adriaen Coorte, a single stem of gooseberries lies on a gray stone ledge. The light falls so sharply against the dark background that it seems to pass through the thin skins of the berries.
The picture is small, painted on a sheet of paper. Coorte lived in Middelburg, a wealthy port in the Dutch Republic, today's Netherlands, and gooseberries there were a modest local pleasure, often picked wild. He gave this humble fruit a whole picture to itself.
Dutch still life painters of his time often set a skull or a candle beside their fruit, to remind buyers that life ends. Coorte left both out, because the stem itself shows time passing.
Near the top of the twig, the spent flower petals have turned brown and papery. Just below them, on the same stem, hang berries so ripe that their skins look close to splitting.
At a Glance
Artist: Adriaen Coorte (active about 1683 to 1707), Dutch
Painted: 1701
Medium: Oil on paper mounted on wood
Size: 29.7 × 22.8 cm (11.7 × 9 in)
Where to see it: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
11. Itō Jakuchū, Vegetable Nirvana (18th century)
Far from Holland, in eighteenth-century Kyoto, the Japanese painter Itō Jakuchū brushed Vegetable Nirvana in ink on a tall paper scroll. At its center, a white radish lies on its side like a body on a deathbed, and eggplants, cucumbers, yams and dozens of other vegetables crowd around it in mourning.
Jakuchū, who lived from 1716 to 1800, came late to painting. The radish is playing the death of the Buddha, and the man who cast it had spent his first forty years behind a vegetable counter.