Fruit and Flowers

1860

Roger Fenton

Artist, British, 1819 - 1869

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.

Media Options

This object’s media is free and in the public domain. Read our full Open Access policy for images.

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.


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    albumen print

  • Credit Line

    Paul Mellon Fund

  • 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.)

  • Accession

    2005.52.4


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

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

Associated Names

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.

Inscriptions

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

Wikidata ID

Q64170555


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