National Gallery, London
This picture is a still life. In the Renaissance, carvings of still lifes were often part of the wooden decoration inside important rooms in a palace. In the 1600s and 1700s paintings of still lifes also became common and were most often seen in the dining room, where fruit, flowers and animals that had been killed for meat were fashionable decoration. In the 1800s many artists like Fantin-Latour painted small still lifes like this one to practice their skills at arranging a picture, at studying light and at studying texture. Many artists also painted still lifes because they were too poor to pay for an artist's model, or the weather was too bad to paint landscapes. Fantin-Latour did a large number of small pictures like this. He has arranged four apples of different colours and shapes and has made a study of how the light looks on their curved surfaces.