Still life with Orange and Plum, Robert Spear Dunning; oil on canvas, roughly 8 x 10″ (20 x 25 cm); link is to image file page on Wikimedia Commons; as far as I know, the original is in a private collection.
19th century American painter Robert Spear Dunning gives us an elegantly simple painting of an orange and a plum. His exposure of the interior of the orange, and his meticulous eye for texture and color, lend the painting a feeling of complexity comparable to a more elaborate composition.
Though he also painted landscapes, Dunning’s primary subjects were arrangements of fruits or vegetables, occasionally augmented with dishware.
Dunning was sometimes criticized for continuing traditions from the middle of the century into a later period when they had fallen out of favor, a characteristic for which I admire him.
