Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Melons and Morning Glories
Raphaelle Peale (born Annapolis, MD 1774-died Philadelphia, PA 1825)
1813
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 20 3/4 x 25 3/4 in. (52.6 x 65.4 cm.)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Paul Mellon
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Raphaelle Peale's father, Charles Willson Peale, urged his son to paint portraits instead of still lifes, which brought an artist less prestige and fewer commissions. But still lifes suited Raphaelle, who also worked as a taxidermist. He painted this melon as if it were a body opened up for examination, detailing its fluids and flesh so that the painting suggests life, fertility, and death, all at once.Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
