Along with the flowers and fruit, there should be a potato in this still life. It wouldn't be quite as lovely, but it would be absolutely appropriate.
As it is, it's a composition as colourful and intricate as an Edwardian fashionista's Sunday bonnet; a picture no artist could paint. Or, at least, a picture no artist did paint.
This is a photograph. A genuine colour photo, not a black-and-white shot hand-tinted after the event. It's a transparency produced in colour perhaps 100 years ago. There really is nothing new under the sun.
The French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière (whose name so happily translates as "Light") are best remembered for their pioneering work in moving pictures.
But in 1903, the year the Wright Brothers took to the air, the Lumières patented a process they called Autochrome. They began marketing it four years later, and it remained the benchmark for colour photography until the mid-1930s, when Kodachrome and Agfacolor were introduced.
Key to the whole thing was the humble spud.
Not to get too technical (or technical at all), but Autochrome images were recorded on a single glass plate covered with countless microscopic grains of potato starch, dyed red, blue and green, which worked as a light filter.
Until then, colour photos needed three separate exposures to be made, each lasting at least several seconds and possibly several minutes, then superimposed upon one another.
Colour photography is well over a century old. The principles were understood in the early infancy of photography, and various techniques were tried to make them flesh. The earliest known shot is a landscape taken in 1872 at Angoulême, in southwestern France, by Louis Ducos du Hauron.
There was a hunger for colour. People wanted reality, hence the booming trade in hand-tinted black-and-whites. The real real thing was clunky, even more so than black-and-white photography.
Most of the coloured pictures that have survived are hand-tints. Relatively few Autochrome transparencies have emerged unscathed from the passage of time. Many people have never heard of the process, or have any idea that colour photography existed in Victorian times. It was an expensive toy for the moneyed few.
One of the downsides was that the glass plates were both bulky and fragile; easily cracked or broken. The dyes on them were prone to fading, peeling and scratching. They were vulnerable to sunshine and humidity. And, because they were transparencies – slides – there was no negative from which copies could be printed. Each picture was a one-shot deal.
The Lumière brothers, even with still pictures, had cinematic ambitions. Their idea was to project Autochrome on to a big screen. The forerunner, if you like, of this century's ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation.
It was far more convenient, for those who had access to the plates, to view them in a hand-held "diascope." Light passed through the plate and was reflected in a mirror that enabled the viewer to see the illuminated picture. But that meant handling the plates, and handling inevitably led to breakages.
Still, this was a giant step forward in photography and the first colour process to enjoy significant commercial success.
Depending on how carefully the picture was made, the colours could be startlingly true-to-life. The grainy effect of the starch gives a quality that is often closer to that of a painting than a photograph. It makes the pictures delightful to look at.
There is, of course, an Autochrome of the Lumières.
Given the length of time for even a short exposure, they had to be carefully holding a pose. They're outside, perhaps in a brick-paved courtyard, with a stone wall and a stout wooden door behind them.
Both wear dark suits and white shirts. Louis, also wearing a cap, is sitting on what looks like a cane chair. He's knitting... a scarf, perhaps, or a shawl... something with pink wool contained in a brown bag slung from his wrist. His brother is watching and holding an open umbrella. Judging by the light hitting the wall, it doesn't seem to be raining. It's an enigma, bordering on surreal.
Given that they would have had to stay perfectly still for perhaps an uncomfortable length of time, a surprising number of surviving Autochromes are of people, including children. It's a window into a world that doesn't exist in black-and-white. The brightness of their clothes, the colours, the reds, the blues, the purples... It puts air into their lungs and blood into their veins. It gives them life.
Anything seemed to be grist for the brothers' mill, from two attractive women in white hats and bright scarlet jackets picking flowers to a rare colour shot from World War I of a Nieuport biplane fighter.
By the 1930s, Autochrome had advanced from glass plates to flexible film. But Eastman Kodak and Agfa were waiting in the wings with refinements that would allow subjects to be photographed either in motion or in less than perfect light. Their transparency sizes were more manageable, and the technique was being perfected to produce colour negatives, which could produce prints upon demand.
Passionate photographers can be real geeks. Young shooters, raised on digital cameras, play around with film out of curiosity to test the potential and limitations of an unknown medium. Older enthusiasts scour antique stores and pawnshops for Speed Graphics and other classic plate-cameras. They exclaim over the detail and quality a large negative can provide.
Inevitably, there are photographers, mostly in France but a few in the United States, who are poring over the Lumière brothers' papers – and in some cases working with original Lumière equipment – and trying to recreate the beautiful secret of Autochrome.
In a way it's heartening to report that few of them have yet had any notable success. Technique is one thing. Art is something else again.