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Grapes and flowers arranged on a tabletop in front of a dark background fill this horizontal photograph. The image is monochromatic like a black and white photograph but is printed in warm tones of golden and dark browns. The tabletop runs parallel and close to the bottom edge of the composition. It seems to be made of marble and a striped cloth folds over the front edge of the table to our left. Dark grapes are bunched around a vase at the middle of the composition. The vase's tall oval body and long, tapering neck are painted with decorative scrolls and curlicues. A few pieces of small round fruit, perhaps plums, rest on the table in front of the vase. A gleaming goblet to the left and a small figurine of a young boy with a sheaf of wheat to our right are almost lost in the profusion of roses, lilies, hyacinth, and other flowers that fill the space around and behind the objects. The top corners of the photograph are curved, creating a shallow arch.

Roger Fenton

Fruit and Flowers, 1860

Not on View

Medium

albumen print

Dimensions

Overall: 35.5 x 43 cm (14 x 16 15/16 in.)
mount: 50.8 x 68.5 cm (20 x 26 15/16 in.)

Credit Line

Paul Mellon Fund

Accession Number

2005.52.4

Artists / Makers

Roger Fenton (artist) British, 1819 - 1869

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Overview

In the summer of 1860 Fenton made his most deliberate and exacting photographs to date: a series of still lifes. Although the subject obviously had its roots in painting, his densely packed compositions are far removed from the renditions of everyday life by the Dutch masters. Instead, Fenton extravagantly piled luscious fruits and intricately patterned flowers on top of one another and pushed them to the front of his composition so that they seem almost ready to tumble out of the photograph into the viewer's space. It is that very immediacy—the precarious composition, the lush sensuousness of the objects, and our knowledge of their imminent decay—that makes these photographs so striking.

Inscription

engraved lower center: Photographed by R. Fenton; by later hands, bottom center in graphite: F115; bottom right in grpahite: 38; by Hans P. Kraus, Jr., Inc., lower left in graphite: 300602.68

Provenance

The photographer; by descent from his brother; (Hans P. Kraus, Jr., Inc., New York); NGA purchase, 2005.

Associated Names

Kraus, Jr., Inc., Hans P.

Exhibition History

2009: In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes Before the Digital Age, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2009 - 2010, unnumbered catalogue.

2015: In Light of the Past: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, May 3 – July 26, 2015

2019: The Eye of the Sun: Nineteenth-Century Photographs from the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2019, unnumbered catalogue.