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A canvas begun in the autumn of 1848 and finished the following spring is, at 4 foot 8 inches wide.

One of the heftier items in De Laroix in the rise of modern art,

an exhibition at the National Gallery in which paintings by Eugène Delacroix

mingle with others by artists he influenced.

In factual terms, Delacroix presents us with a September evening in a country garden,

in which the last light lingers on a basket

piled deep with produce and on the roses and hollyhocks overhead. The produce, in all its lush

diversity, gourds, peaches and meddlers, red currants and grapes, looks to have been bought from a stall in Leal,

12 miles from de la Croix's out of Paris getaway, but without any thought of the dinner

table. In truth, questions of location and function count for very little in a basket of fruit

in a flower garden.

One does seem to matter, though, is time or forms of resistance to it,

the lingering, the lateness, the harvesting.

Much moved by this stately visual feast.

I struggle to name what feelings it induced. Nostalgia comes quite near.

Facts mattered less to de la Croix than the principle that a painting should form a bridge from mind to mind. I have told myself a hundred times that painting, that is the material thing

called a painting, is no more than a pretext he wrote in his journal on the 18th of July

1850, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

What emotions then ran up to the bridge from his side?

Why did he make this big thing?

By way of a refusal to make yet bigger things,

...