Still Life with Fruit and Nuts

When one of our employees, Ela, found this painting I thought that it would be perfect for around Christmas time! The self-taught African American artist Robert Seldon Duncanson was widely recognized during his lifetime for pastoral landscapes of American, Canadian, and European scenery. Recently, however, art historians began to focus on a small group of still-life paintings (fewer than a dozen are known) that Duncanson produced during the late 1840s. Today's painting is a great example of such. Classically composed with fruit arranged in a tabletop pyramid, the painting includes remarkable passages juxtaposing the smooth surfaces of beautifully rendered apples with the textured shells of scattered nuts.

Once one critic wrote about Duncanson's still-lifes, "the paintings of fruit, etc. by Duncanson are beautiful, and as they deserve, have elicited universal admiration."

Duncanson is now often described as the first African American artist to achieve an international reputation and indeed he enjoyed considerable success exhibiting his landscapes abroad.

P.S. Here are the best autumn foods in still-life paintings, don't check it while hungry!  ;-)