ATTRIBUTED TO JAMES PEALE 1749-1831
Still Life with Grapes and Apples on a Plate
Oil on canvas, 16 X 22" (40.64 x 55.88 cm.)
Unsigned
Museum purchase, 945-0-105
 

James Peale, the youngest brother of Charles Willson Peale, was born in Chestertown, Maryland. He received painting lessons from Charles Willson before serving in the Continental Army during the American Revolution from 1776 to 1779. He resided in Philadelphia with his brother until his marriage in 1782, after which he established his own household and an independent artistic career. For much of the late eighteenth century, both Charles Willson and James were active in the field Of portrait painting, Charles Willson painting in oil on canvas, and James working in watercolor on ivory. It is for these lovely, diminutive images that James is frequently remembered today. But it is in still life that James Peale made his most lasting contribution to the history and development of American art.
The painter and teacher Sir Joshua Reynolds outlined the hierarchy of art subjects for the eighteenth- century students of the Royal Academy in London. His theory, then widely accepted in Europe and the United States, placed history painting with its noble themes at the highest level, and still-life painting at the lowest. Artists were discouraged from merely painting an imitation of nature, which could only demonstrate technical skills and not inform or elevate the intellectual content of the subject. However, at the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries some American painters broke rank to engage in an on-going exploration of that lowest of genres, still life. Chief among them were members of the Peale family.
Charles Willson Peale, founder of the "Peale Dynasty," established a tradition of painting which matured in assorted forms through the families various branches. The two who became involved with still life were his sons Raphaelle and James. Together they laid a foundation for still-life painting upon which succeeding generations of Peales and other artists would build.
James and Raphaelle each developed his own style, but their work had a number of features in common which have come to define "the Peale type" of still life. Usually fruit or other edible items are arranged parallel to the picture Plane on a ledge, shelf, or elevated surface. These are lit from the upper left, the light falling over and defining the forms. Often a second light source illuminates the right background, visually pushing the objects forward out of what would otherwise be shadowed obscurity. The depictions emphasize the spatial clarity of solid, simple shapes. A knife and fruit peel occasionally serve as a punning signature. James's arrangements are more casual than Raphaelle's, usually presenting a profusion of fruit, flowers, or vegetables, with a sense of fullness and abundance, and emphasizing the passage of time. As William H. Gerdts has observed, in James's work there are "age spots, worm holes and other blemishes ... [he was] conscious of and concerned with change and age.
The Butler Institute's painting has many characteristics of the Peale-type still life: mounded fruit casually arranged, illumination from left to right, and a sense of captured time. In it luminous green grapes casually spill across a gilt-rimmed porcelain plate, covering part of it. Rolling over the edge and out on to the gray-surfaced ledge are bunches of red grapes whose curved surfaces vary in color from coppery brown to ruby red. These grapes pile up on the left against a group of yellow apples tinged with red to green streaks and spots. Laid across the grapes is a woody stalk from a grape vine still bearing brown and green colored leaves. The light falling across the fruit defines the colors and accentuates the transparent, taut skins of the different types of grapes. Time has been arrested by the painter at a peak of fullness shared by all the fruit; a moment of ripeness that cannot last but will very soon end with a change of color, loss of firmness, and the sweet fragrance of decay.
This sensitivity to the mutability of nature and the passage of time, as well as the deft rendering of light and surfaces, indicates an experienced eye and hand at work. But these qualities are also expressive of a combined artistic interest and insight into life found in the best work of this extraordinary family of painters.

LINDA CROCKER SIMMONS