The Art Gallery at the Athenaeum contains one of America’s unique collections of 19th century American paintings. Each week we will feature a different work on this page. We hope educators will use this link as a tool to enrich their art curriculum. Vermonters and other citizens throughout the nation can now visit our gallery in this new, intimate, and informative way.
The text describing each painting was written by Mark D. Mitchell, Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum. The digital images were prepared by Robert Jenks of Jenks Studio of Photography in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Please note that the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum prohibits the use of images from its collection in public exhibition, broadcast, electronic reproduction or publication in any form without prior written permission from the institution. If you would like to reproduce any of the Art Gallery images in any form, contact Irwin Gelber at 748-8291, extension 307.
Emilie Preyer (1849-1930), German
Fruit and Wine, undated
OIL ON CANVAS, 9 1/2 by 12 1/2 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
As the only work in the Athenaeum's collection known to have been created by a woman, Emilie Preyer's Fruit and Wine bears witness to the often insurmountable challenges that confronted aspiring women artists during the nineteenth century. As was frequently the case for the successful few, Preyer studied art with her father, Johann Wilhelm Preyer (18o3-1899), who was himself a celebrated still life painter in Dusseldorf, Germany and developed a significant following of women artists that included his daughter as well as the Burlington, Vermont-born painter Helen Searle (1834-1885).
Like her father, Emilie Preyer worked in the Dutch tradition of crisply painted, brightly colored tabletop scenes. From the known record of her paintings, exclusively still lifes, she worked in two basic sizes, of which Fruit and Wine is actually the larger. Moreover, with its translucent glass of champagne, richly veined marble shelf, and diverse fruits, the painting is also among her most challenging subjects with its widely varied forms, textures, colors, and effects of light. The fly, cut apricot and decaying leaves included in the composition are symbols of life's brevity, often referred to by their Latin name, memento Mori.