An Abundance of Fruit

Severin Roesen · c. 1860

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

63.5 × 76.2 cm (25 × 30 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

*An Abundance of Fruit* is one of Severin Roesen's most exuberant celebrations of natural plenty, a canvas overflowing with grapes, peaches, strawberries, and melon rendered with an almost obsessive fidelity to surface and light. Roesen emigrated from Germany to the United States around 1848, bringing with him the meticulous craft traditions of European still-life painting. He settled eventually in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he spent decades producing these lavish tableaux for a newly prosperous American merchant class hungry for images of abundance and refinement. His technique is rooted in the Dutch and Flemish tradition — careful glazing, patient observation of how light moves across a grape's translucent skin or pools in the hollow of a peach — but the scale and generosity of his compositions feel distinctly American, as if the continent itself demanded a bigger bowl. Roesen produced hundreds of variations on this theme, and scholars have noted how rarely two of his paintings share an identical arrangement, suggesting each was worked out freshly from observation and imagination rather than repeated from a stock template. The hand-painted oil reproduction honours that same directness — each brushstroke placed by hand, the luminous depth of the original's glazes rebuilt layer by layer, so that the painting arrives as an object with genuine presence rather than a printed facsimile.