Apple

Apple is a subject in art. The gallery holds 108 works in this subject in art, including works by Gustave Courbet, Jean Honoré Fragonard and Raphael.

Few objects carry as much symbolic freight in Western art as the apple, the round, edible fruit of the apple tree (Malus spp.). Though the Book of Genesis never names the forbidden fruit, medieval and Renaissance painters fixed upon the domestic sweet apple (Malus domestica) as the emblem of temptation and the Fall, a choice reinforced by the Latin pun on malum, meaning both "apple" and "evil." Classical antiquity supplied a parallel mythology: the golden apple of the Hesperides, and the Apple of Discord inscribed "for the fairest," which Eris flung among the goddesses to trigger the Judgement of Paris and, ultimately, the Trojan War. The Roman goddess Pomona, keeper of orchards and especially associated with apples, and her suitor Vertumnus gave artists a further, fertile theme—treated in our own Vertumnus and Pomona by Hendrik Goltzius.

As an artistic motif the apple flourished above all in still life and allegory. Northern painters prized its glossy skin and rounded volume as a test of mimetic skill, while moralizing vanitas pictures let it rot, blemish, or harbor a worm to remind viewers of mortality and decay. Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit (c. 1599) famously refused to idealize its produce, recording wormholes and wilting leaves with unflinching naturalism. The apple also migrated into devotional and genre painting: it appears in Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of the Catholic Faith as a token of original sin, and anchors the quiet domestic labor of Nicolaes Maes's Young Woman Peeling Apples.

The apple's decisive modern chapter belongs to Paul Cézanne, who reportedly vowed to "astonish Paris with an apple." Painting the humblest of subjects again and again, he used the fruit's spherical mass to investigate perception, structure, and shifting viewpoints, dissolving the boundary between Impressionism and the modernist future. Both Picasso and Matisse revered him, and his apples fed directly into Cubism. In the next century René Magritte hovered a green apple before the faceless figure of The Son of Man (1964), making the fruit an instrument of surrealist concealment.

The theme persisted across regions and registers, from the Baroque opulence of Abraham Brueghel's Pomegranates and Other Fruit in a Landscape to American treatments such as Robert Seldon Duncanson's Still Life with Fruit and Nuts and the cider-pressing labor of William Sidney Mount's Cider Making. Across these works the apple proves endlessly adaptable—sacred and profane, sensual and austere—linking still life, allegory, and myth.