Riddle Me This
How is it possible –
Orange, so fresh the leaf is intact
Ruby-red strawberries that if wild would collapse
Together with nuts and raisins, to be
In the same still life in a nineteenth century
Composition? What, summer and winter?
Unless, if not from memory, the painter,
Linked light and shadow, a cream pitcher and sugar bowl,
To real fruits in real life to show the world
Under an innocuous display how
Red, brown, gold, green, and orange could co-exist now?
Enlightenment. The age of reason, the age of season.
©elsp 2025
Have you solved the riddle?
spoiler alert (scroll down for clue)
Annie V.F. Storr, then Assistant Director for Education, American Association of Museums, takes a close look at this painting in an article in the Art Institute of Chicago Museums Studies1.
Raphaelle Peale was known for his attention to detail, not even glossing over imperfections in his subjects. Strawberries, Nuts, &co. is unusual. The strawberries and the orange appear super fresh and intact. Why is this important?
While we are used to having access to produce from across the globe year-round, that wasn’t the case in 1822. There was a seasonal divide. However, Strawberries, Nuts, &co. displays, on the same table, what was considered summer produce (fresh strawberries) and winter produce (orange, nuts, raisins, either harvested or imported). Storr notes it was originally thought that the strawberries were wild, but if that were the case, as fragile wild berries, they would have crushed in the jar.
How, then, if Peale was such a perfectionist, could this composition be real?
For the orange leaf to be so fresh, Storr says the tree would have to have been grown close to Peale’s studio. Storr notes that at the time orangeries had begun cultivating citrus, and graperies rendered grapes. “Both filbert hazelnuts and almonds … could be likewise cultivated following … directions for grating, pruning and caring for the specialized orchard trees.”1p34
For the strawberries to be so fresh, it’s possible they were an out-of-season harvest, as they are consistent with what cultivated strawberries may have looked like at the time. Storr notes that strawberries, though we don’t know what types, were listed as being grown at the Peale family farm outside Philadelphia. This was where Raphaelle’s father Charles Willson Peale (painter, military officer, scientist, naturalist) had a greenhouse, and brother Rubens (painter, museum administrator) had a botanical garden for crossbreeding experiments.
“All of the the natural produce in [the painting] shared a common association with breakthroughs in horticulture and practical cultivation.”1p34
It’s possible that Peale painted the winter elements together, then drew the strawberries in later. But Storr says the more interesting possibility is that Peale was painting from real life to make a scientific point.
“This changes the connotations of the grouping and alters the implied relationships between the elements of the composition.”1p33-34
“If so, in order to assemble these objects, the painter would have needed to rely on the achievements of advanced horticulture. That being the case, we can see [the painting] as directly related to that lauded scientific field that Raphaelle knew especially well through his family’s endeavors.”1p34
CLUE. NOTE: the poem is an acrostic. More on the acrostic form here.
References:
1 Annie V. F. Storr. “Raphaelle Peale’s ‘Strawberries, Nuts, &c.’: A Riddle of Enlightened Science.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 1995, pp. 25–74. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4102810. Accessed 4 May 2025.
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