Lot Details
Lot 192
Severin Roesen
American, 1815-1872
Two-tier Still Life with Fruit, 1854
Signed S. Roesen and dated 1854 (lr); old label affixed to stretcher bar reads Bought/.../Feb 27 1885/by/FSC
Oil on canvas
30 x 25 inches
Provenance:
Private collection, Tennessee
Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York
Private collection, Washington, D.C.
Although one of the most highly regarded still life painters of the mid-nineteenth century, Severin Roesen remains a figure shrouded in mystery. He may have practiced porcelain painting in his native Germany before immigrating to America probably around 1848, when he first submited one of his works to the American Art-Union in New York. Between 1848 and 1852, Roesen sent eleven still lifes to the American Art-Union exhibitions. These opulent compositions descend from the Dutch tradition of luxurious table arrangements as distilled through the work of Roesen's contemporary, the Dusseldorf artist Johann Wilhelm Preyer.
Roesen was something of an itinerant painter for much of his career, first venturing to Pennsylvania sometime in the 1850s, and settling in Williamsport in 1866. It is not entirely clear where he was working at the time he painted this double-tiered composition - a format he employed on a number of occasions. In 1992, Judith Hansen O'Toole had identified at least nine vertical compositions featuring a double-tiered display, as in the present work. All measure approximately 30 x 25 inches, and, as in this example, were intended to be framed with an oval inset. Although Roesen did sometimes employ a white marble ledge, his earlier works, as here, include a ledge of darker gray, brown or black. [Judith Hansen O'Toole, Severin Roesen. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1992, pp. 36, 45] He characteristically included an elaborately decorated porcelain compotier in his fruit compositions, as well as the bird's nest and lemon - its peel carefully cut away to spiral down onto the marble ledge - also seen here. The tiny window reflection so meticulously rendered in the wine glass positioned at lower left is yet another interesting detail that commonly appears in these extraordinary celebrations of abundance.
In Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1839, William H. Gerdts observed that in Roesen's best work, "fruit, flowers, bird's nest, and man-made decorative objects of ceramic and glass are sometimes piled up on a double-tiered table, the tiers almost always of grained grayish marble, which appears to have been his preference. While these often gigantic paintings of literally hundreds of objects have been interpreted as Victorian horror vacui, they are also the ultimate embodiment of mid-century optimism, representing the richness of the land, the profusion of God's bounty in the New World, his blessing upon the American Eden throughout his cornucopia of plenitude." (William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1839. Columbia, Mo: University of Missouri Press; Tulsa, Okla.: Philbrook Art Center, 1981, p. 87)
Estate of a Washington, D.C. Philanthropist
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