Still Life with Watermelon,

1865

Among American painter Charles Willson Peale’s many artistic children, Rubens Peale was a late bloomer. His poor eyesight meant he did not receive his father’s instruction in painting but instead was groomed to manage "Peale’s Museum," the public display of art and natural history Charles Willson began to develop during Rubens’s youth. It was not until the age of seventy-one that Peale was taught to paint — by his daughter, Mary. <em>Still Life with Watermelon</em>, completed during Rubens’s eighty-first year, offers eloquent testimony that he ended his brief career at the peak of his powers. A finely balanced, completely assured example of the artist’s numerically modest oeuvre, the painting partakes of the quiet simplicity of his brother Raphaelle’s frieze-like, Neoclassical compositions, executed decades earlier, and relates as well to his uncle James Peale’s horizontal tabletop arrangements of indirectly illuminated fruit, including the pictorial device of a piece of fruit shown overhanging the table’s edge, relieving its insistent planarity.