Melon and Peaches

A summer arrangement of melon and peaches—two fruits that embodied the peak of warm-season pleasure in Japanese domestic life—is depicted in this 1939 still-life work, one of Shinsui's relatively rare forays into pure still-life subjects rather than figure painting or landscape. The traditional summer fruits, their surfaces rendered with the careful attention to texture and light that Shinsui brought to all his subjects, create a composition that is simultaneously modest in scale and intensive in observation.