Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Charles Sidney Raleigh
American; 19th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
64%
Fruit with Blue-footed Bowl. 1893. Oil on canvas
To position this thing on the quality-spectrum of American still-life painting, I'd say it's better than your average Roesen, worse than your average Peale. Better than Roesen because it takes more than just a painter's interest in its subject, which the artist seems instead to have tried to render not realistically but rather as a reality; worse than Peale because there's nothing really psychic behind its reality. To coin a phrase, I'd say that this painting partakes of "selective modeling": the pear or the granite tabletop could've been plucked from a middling Dutch painting they're so faithful, but the bananas or the bowl could not have. And look at how needlessly far back the urn sits on the table! Or at the black outline given to the bowl and nothing else! The effect of this vacillation between different perspectival modes and even apparent levels of skill is charming, but as with most American "folk art" is cheapened by our knowledge that it's only the result of a lack of training. (TFS, 2025)