James Morgan Lewin (1836 - 1877)
Still Life with Fruit, Flowers and Brass Charger, circa 1865

James Morgan Lewin was born in Swansea, Massachusetts in 1836. He began his career as an engraving apprentice at the Gorham Company in Providence, Rhode Island. At the close of his apprenticeship, he learned to paint photographs and was engaged by Manchester & Chapin, prominent photographers of their time. Lewin later turned his talents to landscape and still life painting.

In 1860, the White Mountain painter Benjamin Champney, who worked alongside Lewin during summers in New Hampshire, writes: “I found he had great imaginative faculties and delicate, deft execution. He went to Boston, took a studio and painted landscape and still life with rare skill and ease” (Champney). With Still Life with Fruit, Flowers and Brass Charger, Lewin espoused a painting style that sought a balance between the overtly suggestive and overtly realistic. The composition offers an intriguing range of textures, which the artist depicts with sensitive handling and a pleasant contrast of warm and cool colors. The various details compete for the viewer’s attention, so that it is impossible for the eye to be drawn to one particular spot.

In the Dutch tradition of still life, Lewin displays living objects that are not in their healthiest or most idealized form: the bruised banana, partially eaten watermelon, and a peeled lemon. These objects act as symbols which are intended to remind viewers of the mortality of living objects, and, in turn, themselves. Additionally, the pink rose in bloom emphasizes the evenescence of human life.

From 1858 until his death in 1877, Lewin was active among the artistic milieu in Providence, Rhode Island and Boston. He taught in Providence at the Charles Field Street Family and Day School, and was a member of the Providence Art Club. In Boston, he exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum and was a member of the
Boston Art Club. He died at the age of forty-one.

Provenance: From a private New York collection to the gallery.

Bibliography:

Benjamin Champney, Sixty Years' Memories of Art and Artists (New York, 1977; reprint of 1900 edition,
Woburn, Mass.), http://whitemountainart.com/ChampneysBook/bc_book_entiretext.htm