1855
91.0 x 127.0 cm
Bubbling Champagne and over a dozen varieties of fresh fruit are featured in this visual spectacle. Nineteenth-century improvements in cultivation and shipping practices enabled the extravagant assortment, which includes a tropical pineapple and heavily seeded melons that allude to the nation’s future bounty. A German immigrant, Roesen fled the revolutions of 1848 for the promises of America. He exhibited in New York in the 1850s, sending eleven paintings to the American Art-Union’s Free Gallery exhibitions between 1848 and 1852. In 1863 he settled in Pennsylvania, where his patrons included lumber industry moguls who relished the perceived limitlessness of American resources.