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Lot Essay
Like A Yellow Room (lot 46), the picture illustrates Moore's habit of painting multiple versions of his compositions, altering the colour schemes and making minor adjustments to the design. Apples is one of three versions of the subject, all identical in size, which were painted in 1875. The others were entitled A Sofa (fig. 1) and Beads (fig. 2), the latter being exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876. According to A.L.Baldry, Moore's pupil and biographer, A Sofa was painted first, while Apples and Beads were repetitions.
The colour schemes vary dramatically. Apples is a harmony of green, turquoise blue, brown and white, set off by touches of orange. Robin Asleson describes it more poetically as 'an adventurous combination of mottled greens and blues, with butterscotch, brown, white and charcoal accents.' A Sofa is a warmer chromatic ensemble of russets, browns, creams and yellows, with a few details in blue to act as foils; while Beads is again in a warm register, oranges and pinky browns contrasting with sky blues, and the occasional enlivening note of white and red.
The variations in detail, on the other hand, are very slight. For example, the apples on the floor in our version disappear in the other two, while only the girl on the right in A Sofa wears a bead necklace. It was typical of Moore to take the name of our picture from an insignificant detail. This was invariably his practice in his mature work as a means of emphasising the pictures' total lack of narrative content.
Cataloguing Apples for the Moore exhibition at Newcastle in 1972, Richard Green compared the composition to that of the well-known Symphony in White No. 3 by the artist's close friend Whistler, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867 and now in the Barber Institute, Birmingham. Both pictures betray the influence of the seated or reclining figures among the Elgin Marbles, which had had such an impact on the early development of Victorian classicism in the 1860s.
Moore returned to the theme of the reclining female figure, throughout his career, and the three paintings of 1875 were the result of many experiments. They seem to have their origin in a small painting entitled A Palm Fan that Moore showed at the Royal Academy in 1875 (Asleson, p. 128, pl. 123). Further studies followed until a composition was perfected capable, as Robin Asleson puts it, of 'serving as a vehicle for more abstract concerns'. A study specifically related to Apples, in which two squat ginger jars replace the slender vases ultimately adopted, is in the York City Art Gallery. Another preparatory version of the composition, well advanced and more or less full size, is at Yale (fig. 3).
While it is right to emphasise the formal, abstract quality of these pictures, so strikingly at variance with conventional Victorian practice, it should also be noted that, to quote Robin Asleson once again, 'Moore's sofa pictures figure among his most sensuous evocations of the female form...In A Sofa, Beads and Apples, the snaking movement of the drapery exaggerates the curves of the anatomy, which is clearly legible beneath the trasparent gauze fabric. Flushed cheeks and parted lips add a sultry quality to the women's unconscious repose, while their delicately poised fingertips heighten our sense of the fragility of this moment of suspended animation'.
At an early stage in its history, Apples was bought by William Kenrick, mayor of Birmingham, who also owned The End of the Story, one of the single standing female figures that Moore had shown at the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in 1877. Kenrick's brother-in-law, Joseph Chamberlain, himself a former mayor of Birmingham and now a Liberal member of parliament, was also a patron of Moore's, buying two more of his Grosvenor exhibits, Sapphires and Birds. Both men did much to encourage the arts in Birmingham, and their pictures were probably acquired with this aim in mind. Indeed, Chamberlain lent his two Moores to the Art Gallery when it opened in 1885, and they form part of the collection to this day.
The colour schemes vary dramatically. Apples is a harmony of green, turquoise blue, brown and white, set off by touches of orange. Robin Asleson describes it more poetically as 'an adventurous combination of mottled greens and blues, with butterscotch, brown, white and charcoal accents.' A Sofa is a warmer chromatic ensemble of russets, browns, creams and yellows, with a few details in blue to act as foils; while Beads is again in a warm register, oranges and pinky browns contrasting with sky blues, and the occasional enlivening note of white and red.
The variations in detail, on the other hand, are very slight. For example, the apples on the floor in our version disappear in the other two, while only the girl on the right in A Sofa wears a bead necklace. It was typical of Moore to take the name of our picture from an insignificant detail. This was invariably his practice in his mature work as a means of emphasising the pictures' total lack of narrative content.
Cataloguing Apples for the Moore exhibition at Newcastle in 1972, Richard Green compared the composition to that of the well-known Symphony in White No. 3 by the artist's close friend Whistler, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867 and now in the Barber Institute, Birmingham. Both pictures betray the influence of the seated or reclining figures among the Elgin Marbles, which had had such an impact on the early development of Victorian classicism in the 1860s.
Moore returned to the theme of the reclining female figure, throughout his career, and the three paintings of 1875 were the result of many experiments. They seem to have their origin in a small painting entitled A Palm Fan that Moore showed at the Royal Academy in 1875 (Asleson, p. 128, pl. 123). Further studies followed until a composition was perfected capable, as Robin Asleson puts it, of 'serving as a vehicle for more abstract concerns'. A study specifically related to Apples, in which two squat ginger jars replace the slender vases ultimately adopted, is in the York City Art Gallery. Another preparatory version of the composition, well advanced and more or less full size, is at Yale (fig. 3).
While it is right to emphasise the formal, abstract quality of these pictures, so strikingly at variance with conventional Victorian practice, it should also be noted that, to quote Robin Asleson once again, 'Moore's sofa pictures figure among his most sensuous evocations of the female form...In A Sofa, Beads and Apples, the snaking movement of the drapery exaggerates the curves of the anatomy, which is clearly legible beneath the trasparent gauze fabric. Flushed cheeks and parted lips add a sultry quality to the women's unconscious repose, while their delicately poised fingertips heighten our sense of the fragility of this moment of suspended animation'.
At an early stage in its history, Apples was bought by William Kenrick, mayor of Birmingham, who also owned The End of the Story, one of the single standing female figures that Moore had shown at the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in 1877. Kenrick's brother-in-law, Joseph Chamberlain, himself a former mayor of Birmingham and now a Liberal member of parliament, was also a patron of Moore's, buying two more of his Grosvenor exhibits, Sapphires and Birds. Both men did much to encourage the arts in Birmingham, and their pictures were probably acquired with this aim in mind. Indeed, Chamberlain lent his two Moores to the Art Gallery when it opened in 1885, and they form part of the collection to this day.