Fruit and Coffeepot

Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse is a still life work, with a bowl of fruit and cup of coffee as its main subject matter. Painted in 1898 as oil on canvas, Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse is one of the artist's earlier works and is deeply entrenched in the Impressionist style.

The painting of Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse is primarily concerned with the task of composition, arranging everyday objects in an intriguing and newly imagined way in order to capture both their ordinary quality and yet somehow make them seem extraordinary too. The brushstrokes are heavy and exact, with each swirl of fruit and the texture of the table cloth made to feel tangibly real. However, the real star of the painting is the way that Matisse manages to capture the light as it gently caresses these mundane objects arranged upon the table.

The heavier brushstrokes help to effortlessly capture the way light refracts into lots of other colours, with the sunlight hitting the knife in the upper centre of the painting to create white, red and purple fragments of light. The grapes in the fruit bowl seem to gleam like jewels, whilst the cup of coffee shines around the rim and saucer as the sunlight settles upon these raised elements.

Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse is a masterclass in capturing the colours held in a single streak of sunlight, with the viewer able to find deeper shadows and greater fields of colour with each viewing of the painting. Although Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse definitely has a greater sense of reality than some of his later works, the artist is not primarily concerned with showing life as it is, but rather how it could be, with colour the main focus of the piece.

Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse also harks back to two of his earlier works on a similar still life theme, notably The Dessert Table and Blue Pot and Lemon. The angle of Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse is also almost photographic, as if the artist is standing from a higher height in order to capture the true beauty of such an ordinary and everyday scene. Fruit and Coffeepot by Henri Matisse can currently be seen exhibited by the State Hermitage Museum in Russia.