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.
Etienne Adolphe Piot (1850-1910), French Italian
Girl with Cherries, undated
OIL ON CANVAS,34 x 25 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
This charming portrayal of a young Italian peasant girl holding a basket of ripe cherries is typical of French genre painter Etienne Adolphe Piot's work during the 1870s. The artist, however, painted the composition in two different forms: one in which the sitter is a girl, as here, and the other in which the sitter is an attractive, engaging young woman. The difference in tone between the two types of sitter is considerable, as the latter version takes on a sexual dimension that is absent in this composition.
An unexpected discovery regarding Piot's career is his possible Confederate sympathy, no small concern in America in the wake of the Civil War. The artist painted undated portraits of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson that suggest he had contacts in the South and was entrusted to create likenesses of two of its most admired military leaders. Given that Piot's Italian Girl with Cherries hung with pride of place in Horace Fairbanks' living room, we can only speculate that Fairbanks was unaware of any Confederate leaning.