ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the edible matter in Robert Duncanson’s art and examines the many ways that fruit connected him to local networks invested in art, horticulture and racial equality. Pictures such as Fruit Piece show raspberries, cherries, strawberries, gooseberries, citrus fruits and two varieties of currants resting on a ceramic plate. Duncanson similarly lavished attention on the unique characteristics of fruit, endowing each one with its own individual portrait. His botanically astute still-life paintings, consequently, raised questions around race and privilege and who had access to horticultural resources in the mid-nineteenth century. Duncanson’s still lifes may have garnered favorable reviews because they translated period beliefs that America’s fruits were blessings from God into paint. The capacity for his paintings to contradict racial prejudice and embody ideas about equality and democracy added to their value for local fruit-growing art patrons who were also abolitionists, sympathetic to the plight of black Americans.
