Pear 'Louise Bonne'

Pear 'Louise Bonne' depicts the heritage French dessert pear Louise Bonne de Jersey, a long-shouldered cultivar with russeted skin and a flush of red on its sunward side. Carborundum, the technique used here, involves coating the plate with silicon-carbide grit suspended in an acrylic binder, producing a granular surface that holds ink in dense, velvety tonal masses rather than discrete lines. The result is well suited to the matte, slightly suede-like skin of a ripe pear — the fruit's volume modelled by gradations of plate tone rather than by hatching. Doyle has worked extensively from heritage fruit cultivars grown in Irish kitchen gardens, and the choice of Louise Bonne fits a wider strand of her practice that records named varieties as much as it records the fruit itself. The print sits alongside her apple, quince, and medlar studies in this orchard sequence.