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| Henri Fantin-Latour Still life with Roses and Fruit 1863 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Still life 1866 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"What is it about colors that seems to obstruct our understanding? They are given to visual experience along with shapes, yet we have no similar difficulties with shapes. A crucial difference seems to be that the essential character of shapes is amenable to mathematical representation, but the essential nature of colors resists it; the one appears quantitative, the other qualitative. Shapes are given to more than one sense, and we are much inclined to suppose that the only sort of characteristics that can be accessible to more than one sensory mode are those which bear a structure. The study of structures is, of course, the special province of that form of discursive thinking par excellence, mathematics. And, it goes without saying, everything mathematizable is a proper object of scientific study."
"Colors, on the other hand, have a brute factuality about them. From Locke and Hume to Moore and Russell, they have been taken to be the paradigmatic instances of simple unanalysable qualities. But the supposed unanalysability of colors, obvious though it has seemed to many reflective people, does not coexist comfortably with the equally apparent 'internal relatedness' of colors, whereby they exclude – yet intimately involve – each other. There is no variation of magnitude, intensive or extensive, that connects every color with every other color. And yet colors are as systematically related to each other as are lengths or degrees of temperature. Red bears on its face no reference to the character of green. Yet red categorically excludes green while at the very same time resembling it in an incommensurably closer fashion than the resemblance of either red or green to any shape or sound."
– from Color for Philosophers (1988) by C.L. Hardin
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| Pierre-Auguste Renoir Still life with Peaches 1881 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Pierre-Auguste Renoir Still life with Peaches & Grapes 1881 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Paul Cézanne Apples 1878-79 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Paul Cézanne Still life with Apples & Primroses c. 1890 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Paul Gauguin Still life 1891 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Paul Gauguin after Cézanne Still life with Teapot & Fruit 1896 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Camille Pissarro Still life with Apples & Pitcher 1872 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Pierre-Auguste Renoir Bouquet of Lilacs 1875 Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Vase of Chrysanthemums ca. 1875 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Still-life of flowers 1860 Hermitage, St Petersburg |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Still life with pansies 1874 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Potted Pansies 1863 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |