Still Life: Fruit

Severin Roesen American

Not on view

Bubbling Champagne and over a dozen varieties of fresh fruit are featured in this visual spectacle. Nineteenth-century improvements in cultivation and shipping practices enabled the extravagant assortment, which includes a tropical pineapple and heavily seeded melons that allude to the nation’s future bounty. A German immigrant, Roesen fled the revolutions of 1848 for the promises of America. He exhibited in New York in the 1850s, sending eleven paintings to the American Art-Union’s Free Gallery exhibitions between 1848 and 1852. In 1863 he settled in Pennsylvania, where his patrons included lumber industry moguls who relished the perceived limitlessness of American resources.

Still Life: Fruit, Severin Roesen (American (born Prussia), Boppard-am-Rhein 1816–72?), Oil on canvas, American

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