No information on the artist has been located. The artist's name and active date of 1777 come from the inscription on the National Gallery's painting Basket of Fruit with Parrot (1980.62.20). While it is possible that this is an English painting, it probably was produced in America by an artist copying a European still life, or more likely, a print. Still life subjects were very rare in the eighteenth century. Although it is not as delicately or minutely painted as the early nineteenth-century still lifes by Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), Thomas Badger (1792-1868), or Eliab Metcalf (1785-1834), it is this type of formal, academic still life to which Randall aspired. [This is an edited version of the artist's biography published in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
Artist Bibliography
1992
Chotner, Deborah, with contributions by Julie Aronson, Sarah D. Cash, and Laurie Weitzenkorn. American Naive Paintings. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 317-318.