Machete and Fruit by Milton Avery is an oil painting on canvas mounted on board. It measures seventeen and a half inches tall by twenty-three and three quarters of an inch wide. It is hung in landscape orientation, meaning its longest side runs parallel to the ground. The painting depicts a bowl of fruit sitting on a table with a machete resting in front of it. Starting from the background, there is an almost solid block of brown that takes up the upper half of the painting. The artist’s name is seen on the left and rightmost extremes of this brown rectangle, Milton on the left, and Avery on the right. The names appear on either side of a large teal rectangle. This teal shape appears to be the top part of a dining chair’s backrest, visible above a large brown table’s surface, which takes up the lower half and foreground of the painting. Underneath the name Avery on the right, the year the painting was made, 1949 is also visible. The teal chair has two brass ends which are spherical in shape, on the upper left and upper right corners of the teal rectangle. In front of the chair, taking up the lower half of the canvas, there is another almost solid block of brown paint which serves as the table top platform for the bowl of fruit and machete. This brown table surface has been scraped to expose the canvas underneath and create a repeating zig zag pattern that resembles a tablecloth. In the middle sits the bowl of fruit, painted blue and also scraped in thin lines to expose the underlying canvas. The thin white lines of the canvas give the blue bowl a glass-like luster. Inside the bowl there are green grapes, oranges, apples, and mangos. Laying at the base of the bowl of fruit is a machete. The machete has a brown hilt, wrapped in leather. The blade is inside its sheath, or cover, which also a shade of brown, like the color of the leather handle.