ELI5: Why Did Artists Paint Fruit?

Artists painted fruit because it was an easy, colorful part of everyday life that stayed perfectly still while they practiced their skills.

Imagine you want to take a picture of your family pet, but your dog keeps running around and jumping on the sofa. That makes it really hard to get a good picture, right? Long ago, before cameras were invented, artists had to sit and paint for hours, days, or even weeks.

Fruit was the ultimate helper for an artist for a few simple reasons:

• It never moved: Unlike a squirming puppy or an impatient person, an apple sits quietly on a kitchen table for as long as you need.
• It was right there in the house: Artists didn't have to travel to a faraway mountain or hire a fancy king to sit for a portrait. They just picked up whatever was in their kitchen bowl, like a bowl of grapes or a sliced lemon.
• It was great for showing off: Painting fruit let artists show their friends how good they were at painting textures. They could show a fuzzy peach, shiny red cherries, or the see-through skin of a green grape. It was like a video game challenge to make the painted food look so real that your tummy would rumble.

At the same time, fruit reminded people of how fast time moves. Everyone knows that if you leave a banana on the counter for too long, it gets brown and mushy. By painting a bowl of fresh, pretty fruit, artists could freeze a delicious, ordinary moment of everyday life forever, before it spoiled.