The Melon

Edouard Manet

National Gallery of Art

A golden yellow melon painted with thick strokes of straw and butter yellow with touches of camel brown sits at the center of a wooden table with a blue top in this almost square still life painting. The sage-green stem droops over the left side and the whole melon leans slightly to our left. The table fills the lower half of the painting, and its top is painted with visible strokes of marine blue, blue gray, and white. The background is caramel brown painted thinly in areas with a darker shade of brown. The artist signed in lower right, “Manet.”