Description: still life; fruit
Label Text: This may be the painting that Margaretta Angelica Peale exhibited in 1829 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as Water Melon, Peaches &c. Still-life painting was particularly popular in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. This may have been related to a new interest in science taking root in that city as well as a desire to celebrate the variety of America’s agricultural products, which were a source of national pride.
Few women of Peale’s era received formal artistic training or worked in the demanding medium of oil painting. Peale came from an illustrious family of American artists, headed by her uncle Charles Willson Peale, who was a painter, naturalist, and founder of a museum. Her father, the noted still-life painter James Peale, taught her and her three sisters to paint.
Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1952.53 |