A Still Life Painting Analysis

A Still Life Painting by Robert Spear Dunning (Slide #1)

Hello Everyone,

On the field trip to the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland I chose a painting of Still Life from the Smith’s gallery, painted by a nineteenth-century American artist, Robert Spear Dunning who lived from 1828 to 1905.

(Slide #2)

This painting is of oil on canvas entitled Still Life in a Dining Room Interior and painted around 1875 by Robert Dunning- an artist known for his association with numerous still life works. In this painting we can see the artist uses a normal view, balanced composition and a mix of vivid hues to convey a sense of prosperity and harmonious aesthetics, representative of the mood of people around the time of the painting

In 1853, on his return home he worked in his own studio. It was, however, around 1865 that Dunning, inspired by his association with these artists and by the post-civil war boom in Fall River, started painting still life and soon concentrated mostly on fruits and flowers, for which he became best known. The influx of wealth in Fall River had its people indulging in extravagances. Art was in demand and its citizens found great comfort in still life paintings, to the extent that Dunning started an art school The Fall River Evening Drawing School which focused on still life art.

(Slide # 5)

Still life painting has been around since ancient times and portrays a unique quality of strangeness in that it mixes visual effects from different seasons in one presentation. Philadelphia is perhaps the birth place of the American still life paintings and home of renowned still life artists like Charles Willson Pearle, founder of the Pearle Museum. This influence rapidly spread to the neighboring regions including Fall River. In the mid nineteenth-century, in the post-civil war days, still life paintings of fruits were plentiful as they express optimism and comfort.

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