Still-life paintings often become quiet portals. Appearing as small, staged arrangements that open into the deeper architecture of memory. Returning to Alfred-Arthur Brunel de Neuville’s Chaudron et prunes, I recognize that familiar sensation: the way a single object can call forth entire seasons of one’s life. What draws me in is not merely the painter’s skill with copper or light, but the vessel itself. The copper appears warm, luminous, and evocative stirring memories of a time defined by sweetness, ritual, and early marriage.
My wife and I had been married only a short while when we rented an apartment above a small candy shop. During most of the year the owners ran a brunch café, and I often baked for them. Things like pies, cakes, and other small pastries that felt like offerings of domestic goodwill. But at Christmastime, the café transformed. The air filled with peppermint, sugar, and anticipation. Their candy canes were locally famous, and the day I was invited downstairs to help make them felt like initiation into a seasonal mystery. The thrill was almost childlike. It felt as though I had been welcomed behind the curtain of a winter ritual.
The copper pot in the painting recall those heavy vessels we used to boil the sugar. The massive kettles that radiated heat and shimmered with the same reddish glow de Neuville captures so faithfully. The alchemy of candy-making unfolded in stages: the boil, the pour onto marble slabs chilled to an almost arctic cold, the labor of pulling and folding the molten mass until it turned glossy and firm. The sensory details return as vividly as scent: the sweetness in the air, the snap of cooling sugar, the rhythm of hands working in practiced coordination.
Psychologically, such memories inhabit a space Bachelard described as “intimate immensity,” where small domestic experiences expand into emotional landscapes. That year above the candy store carries this expansive quality. It was a time when so much felt malleable: early marriage, creative work, the forming of our shared rhythms. Like the sugar we pulled on cold marble, life could be shaped, stretched, twisted into something enduring.
As I return to those memories, I am struck by the vivid symbolism embedded in the candy canes themselves. The red and white stripes are more than festive coloration; they are visual metaphors. Red, with its warmth and vibrancy, suggests vitality and celebration. White, crisp and cool, evokes clarity and stillness. Psychologically their pairing creates a chromatic dialogue. They create an energy braided with purity, exuberance intertwined with restraint. The colors announce the season long before taste or smell can, and they echo, in a quiet way, the emotional dualities of Christmas: joy laced with remembrance, festivity bound up with nostalgia.
And then there is the iconic crook. Forming that bend by hand was always the final gesture, the moment when the straight rod became something recognizable, even emblematic. The curve has accumulated meanings over time, the shepherd’s crook, the initial “J," but for me it signifies something more personal: the truth that sweetness rarely travels in straight lines. The most enduring joys of life, whether the hope of marriage, rituals, or community, bend and arc and accommodate. The hook at the end of a candy cane is a reminder that delight often emerges where the line changes direction.
Returning to de Neuville’s painting, the copper cauldron becomes more than still-life subject. It becomes a metaphor for resilience and receptivity. They become the psychological vessel that carries warmth without being consumed by it. The plums scattered across the worn tabletop evoke the quiet ripening of life’s seasons. Their presence reminds me how sweetness, even in emotion, develops slowly, sometimes haphazardly, and how memory preserves the fragrance of such ripeness long after the season has passed.
We lived in that apartment only a year before buying our house, but for many Christmases afterward I returned to help make candy canes. Each December the ritual revived itself: the heavy copper pots steaming, the sting of peppermint rising in clouds, the laughter and warmth shared in the back kitchen. These memories have acquired a patina not unlike the copper itself glowing, worn, and deeply human.
So when I look at Chaudron et prunes, I see more than a vessel and fruit arranged in a painterly triangle. I see a return to that early chapter of life: the sweetness of forming traditions, the delight of learning a craft, the small domestic joys that become anchors for memory. The still life becomes a threshold through which past and present meet as a visual echo of copper heat and peppermint air.
And I am grateful. Grateful for the labor that once felt like play, for the warmth stored in memory, and for the way art can draw those recollections to the surface with the gentle clarity of a cooling sugar rope. In the muted glow of de Neuville’s copper cauldron, I feel the season again: bright, crooked, sweet, and shaped by hand.