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About Severin Roesen
Born near Cologne, Germany, Roesen emigrated to America (New York), where eleven of his still-lifes were sold to the American Art-Union by 1850. The Corcoran Gallery has Roesen’s earliest dated work (1848). Around 1857 Roesen moved to Pennsylvania where there was a large German-American population, and became one of America’s greatest "old master" still-life painters of fruit and flowers. His studio in Williamsport, Pennsylvania was described as a "typical bohemian den" that included a large stove, a chaise longue for a bed and about one hundred paintings. Friends would come for pipe-smoking and beer drinking. Roesen would apparently rely on his memory as much as he would look at actual fruit and flowers. One of his major sources was the Dutch flower painter Jan van Huysum (1682-1749). Roesen won a prize for landscape painting at a county fair competition in the fall of 1859, though not one of his landscapes has come down to us.
For Large Still-life with Fruit, also called Still-life: Fruit and Wine, Roesen utilized an elaborate two-tiered arrangement, one of his compositional types. The large stem of white grapes, set at a diagonal, unifies the abundant mass of fruit and leaves. An opposing diagonal is established by the sliced watermelon, and what appears to be a champagne bottle anchors the whole, as a central vertical element. The elegant glass, aligned with grapes on the far left, provides a secondary vertical. There is hardly any undecorated area where the eye may rest.
LITERATURE:
Brindle, John V. and Sally Secrist. American Cornucopia: 19th Century Still Lifes and Studies. Exh. cat. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie-Mellon University, 1976, cat. no. 45. Illustrated, cover. O’Toole, Judith Hansen. Severin Roesen. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1992. Illustrated, pl. 14. |
Paintings by Severin Roesen
| Large Still Life with Fruit |
| oil on canvas: 30 x 40 inches |
| signed: lower left |
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Click Picture to Enlarge
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