Still Life: Fruit

Severin Roesen

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art