The Apple Seller (c. 1890): Art, History and Details

The Apple Seller (c. 1890) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This painting depicts a young country girl offering apples to Renoir's wife, Aline. The boy in the straw hat may be the artist's nephew, Edmond, but the young girl with the ribbon in her hair has not been identified. Bathed in soft, dappled sunlight, the figures are united through the fluid brushstrokes that cover the canvas. The leaping dog provides an accent of humor and motion in an otherwise tranquil scene. The picture was probably completed at Essoyes, in eastern France.

Object facts

• Title: The Apple Seller
• Date: c. 1890
• Creator attribution: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 93 x 82.2 x 9.5 cm (36 5/8 x 32 3/8 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 65.8 x 54.5 cm (25 7/8 x 21 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1958.47

A detail from the museum

Using repetitive, soft, light-of-touch brushstrokes to form patches of color, Renoir creates a sense of dappled light that reflects on the ground and caresses the figures, giving the painting an ethereal, dreamlike quality.

Collection credit

Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.

Further reading listed by the museum

• Meier-Graefe, Julius, Florence Simmonds, and George W. Chrystal. Modern art; being a contribution to a new system of æsthetics. London,UK: W. Heinemann, 1908.
• Davidson, Martha. "Courbet--Seurat: From Realism to Neo-Impressionism." ARTnews 35 (March 27, 1937): 17-18, 24.
• Coe, Nancy. The History of the Collecting of European Paintings and Drawings in the City of Cleveland. Thesis M.A. Oberlin College, 1955.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.