Still Life (Fruits and Vegetables)

Patrick Henry Bruce likely painted the present work in the fall of 1911, inspired by his intense fascination with Paul Cézanne and guidance from his neighbor, friend and teacher Henri Matisse. Barbara Rose explains of this period of Bruce's career, "Bruce was painting in a highly assured Cézannesque style derived from Matisse...Using color contrast rather than light and shade to model form, between 1910 and 1912 Bruce began interpreting still life as a monumental subject. In Matisse's sculpture class, which Bruce also took, Matisse taught that the purpose of studying sculpture was to understand better how to present volume in painting. No one took him more literally than Bruce, who manages to give a high degree of sculptural relief to his plates of fruit and vases of flowers through the disposition of warm and cool colors arranged in ascending and descending chromatic scales, separated into individual brushstrokes, each of which represented another angled plane in space." (Patrick Henry Bruce: American Modernist, A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1979, p. 49)