For nearly two centuries, artists have depicted Long Island as an edible Eden.
Healthy livestock graze without fear of predators. The branches of trees sag under the weight of their fruit. Rows of carefully tended corn grow tall in the summer sun. Hunters and trappers find plentiful game in the marshes and forests, as do fishermen and clam diggers in the rivers and coastal waters. Each is attainable in great quantity, seemingly limited only by how hard one is willing to work. Artists in the Mount family of Stony Brook and Setauket were among the earliest proponents of this theme. Beginning in the 1830s, William Sidney Mount achieved international renown for his depictions of rural Long Island and its people. He was joined by his brothers Shepard Alonzo Mount and Henry Smith Mount, and Henry’s daughter Evelina. All four painted still lifes, pastoral farm scenes, and studies of island flora and fauna. Subsequent artists brought their own unique perspectives, and they all serve as guides to the cornucopia of foods that Long Islanders grew, raised, hunted, and gathered.
As the original forbidden fruit of Eden, the apple became a rich symbol through centuries of Western art, representative of knowledge, temptation, sin, love, beauty, and health.
It’s the most commonly depicted food in this collection, with the viewer getting to see the initial blossoms, men picking the mature fruit, and a girl peeling apples. Harvesting food in this Eden is no easy task. In the path from field to table men, women, and children pick, husk, weed, feed, water, dig, butcher, pluck, shuck, and gather everything by hand. It was dirty, tough, and anonymous work in the early nineteenth century, and remains so today. Together, the works in this exhibition testify to these rural Americans’ resourcefulness and success at working the land and water for our benefit.
Gathering Apples, 1865, colored
wood engraving, Edwin Austin Forbes (1839-1895)
Landscape painter and etcher Edwin Forbes made his reputation during the Civil War for his coverage of battles and other military scenes. But with the war six months past, the Brooklyn-based artist turned his attention to the local fall apple harvest for this drawing that was engraved and published in Harper’s Weekly on October 20, 1865. As the owner stands beside a pair of horses, two workmen pile apples into a wagon while three children also lend a hand. Most of the apples will likely be crushed and fermented into hard cider.
returning from the orchardThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
VWilliam Sidney Mount (1807-1868), Returning from the Orchard, 1862, oil on panel. Bequest of Rommel Wilson, 1961. A young woman returns from an orchard with a bowl of apples, in a scene that feels like a precursor to Shepard Mount’s "Girl Peeling Apples" (1838) though painted decades later by his brother William. Not dressed for a day of outdoor labor, her elegant dress and sunhat instead suggest a quick trip to the farm’s orchard before returning indoors. The many apples held to her waist evoke the long tradition of the fruit symbolizing fertility in Western art.
Girl Peeling Apples SAMThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Shepard Alonzo Mount (1804-1868), Girl Peeling Apples, 1838, oil on panel. As a cat and a farmhand watch, a young girl sits on a farmhouse porch peeling apples – most likely for a pie. It was common for Long Island farmers to plant apple trees on their farms, ensuring a crop each fall for eating and pressing into cider. While better known as a portrait painter, Shepard Alonzo Mount also painted genre scenes at the same time as his brothers, William and Henry.
Apple Blossom_MountThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Evelina Mount (1837-1920), Apple Blossoms on a Branch, oil on board. Creating a permanent memory of spring, Evelina Mount painted this study of apple blossoms and gave it to her brother’s daughter Daisy for her birthday. Evelina’s younger brother Malcolm had moved with his wife from Long Island to California in the 1860s, where their daughter Sarah Fisher “Daisy” Mount was born on April 2, 1867. Perhaps inspired by her aunt, Daisy also took up painting, and studied at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco in the 1890s.
Apple BlossomThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
William Moore Davis (1829-1920), Apple Blossoms: A Study from Nature (1876), Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1976. A friend of William Sidney Mount and also born in Setauket, painter William Moore Davis was primarily self-taught. While he painted and exhibited in New York and Brooklyn in the 1860s and '70s, he lived most of his ninety years in Port Jefferson. Primarily living and working in nearby Setauket and Stony Brook, Mount was a major influence on Davis’s painting. He also painted a portrait of Davis’s daughter as a gift to his friend, a couple years after her passing. Davis painted genre scenes, landscapes, and still lifes, with "Apple Blossoms" inviting comparison to Mount’s own studies of fruit painted decades earlier.
Mischievous DropThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), Mischievous Drop, 1857, oil on panel, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1955. With an alert dog underfoot, a girl is about to drop a pair of cherries into the mouth of a sleeping boy. William Sidney Mount painted "Mischievous Drop" for friend and fellow artist John M. Falconer in New York City for $150. The following year it was one of six paintings that Mount exhibited at the National Academy of Design, where both men were members. Eager to reclaim his new painting, Falconer wrote to Mount on July 6th that “Good Mrs. Crocker gave me the Mischievous Drop off the Walls of the Academy twenty minutes before the exhibition closed. I posted home with it and put it on the wall where I feel sure it looks better, and if not admired by so many it will have a more thorough appreciation from the few.”
Wild Cherries, 1885, Oil on Panel, Evelina Mount (1837-1920)
Both the daughter and niece of painters, Evelina Mount grew up in Stony Brook in the family farmhouse where her uncle William maintained a studio in the attic. While her father Henry had died a few years after her birth, William encouraged his niece to paint, and offered advice about technique and inspiration. Her interests centered on farm scenes and floral studies. "Wild Cherries" describes both the berries’ vivid color and non-cultivated nature. As cherries are a symbol of friendship, Evelina gave this painting to her friend Elizabeth Vail on Independence Day in 1885.
Pumpkin Field at SunsetThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Ty Stroudsburg (B.1940), Pumpkin Field at Sunset, 2000, oil on linen, The Ronald G. Pisano Memorial Collection, Gift of Ty Stroudsburg, 2001. Ty Stroudsburg moved from her native New Jersey to Southampton in 1963, where she continues to explore abstraction and experimentation in her painting. The landscapes of the East End appear in her work as a vivid and unpopulated natural world. Despite the seeming naturalness of "Pumpkin Field at Sunset," the single species of plant growing in this field is representative of modern industrial farming as it allows for more efficient planting and harvesting.
Long Island Potato Patch, 1887, Oil on Canvas, Charles Yardley Turner (1850-1918)
Purchase made possible due to
bequest from Melville A. Kitchin,
in memory of Elizabeth Carr Kitchin, 1991. Trained as an artist in his native Baltimore and then in New York and Paris, Charles Yardley Turner eventually focused on genre painting – a style pioneered in America by Long Island’s William Sidney Mount a half century before. Turner depicts these workers harvesting potatoes, a crop for which the island became famous. The growth of railroads on Long Island beginning in the early nineteenth century encouraged farmers to create large commercial farms and ship their produce to the city. In return they received fertilizer (horse manure) and feed. In the twentieth century developers would buy this and other Long Island farms to build suburban residential neighborhoods.
Boy Hoeing CornThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), Boy Hoeing Corn, 1840, oil on panel, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1955. William Sidney Mount noted in his diary that he painted Boy Hoeing Corn “in the open air,” allowing him to accurately observe the light, shadows, and colors of Long Island in early summer. A young boy diligently weeds around the young corn stalks in the hot sun. His broken suspender is evident of his hard work, while the healthy field of corn growing around him implies a successful future in return for putting in such labor.
Pea Pickers, 1888, oil on canvas, Harry Roseland (1867-1950)
Born in Brooklyn and spending his entire life there, Harry Roseland was largely a self-taught painter who specialized in portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes. He earned special recognition for his depiction of agricultural workers in coastal New England and New York. In "Pea Pickers," Roseland shows men and women picking peas under a hot summer sun with a view of the cool waters of a bay just beyond. The painting helps to document the often invisible and intensive manual labor required to grow crops on Long Island.
Still Life with Carrots, 1955, oil on canvas, Jane Wilson (1924-2015)
Moving from her native Iowa to New York in 1949, painter Jane Wilson soon began visiting the East End of Long Island. There, she explored the relationship between land, sea, and sky in more than a half century of painting before her death in 2015. But in addition to the expressionist landscapes for which she became famous, Wilson also painted still lifes. Working in an abstract expressionist style, this collection of fruit and vegetables includes not only the carrots one could find growing in every Long Island garden, but also a lemon – reminding the viewer that our tables are stocked with both local produce and exotic additions.
Tomato PickerThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Robert Gwathmey, (1903-1988), Tomato Picker, 1970, silkscreen on paper. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the social activist painter Robert Gwathmey moved to New York in 1942 to teach at the Cooper Union School of Art. From his time living in the South he became interested in documenting the human condition, most famously through his paintings of African-American agricultural workers. Retiring in 1968, Gwathmey moved to Amagansett where he focused on his art and political activism. In this print of a man picking tomatoes, Gwathmey gives the worker a powerful presence and quiet dignity without romanticizing the hard physical labor. His work has a two-dimensional flatness that is reminiscent of stained glass.
East Hampton Garden, (1895), oil on canvas, Gaines Rugger Donoho (1857-1916)
The Mississippi-born Gaines Ruger Donoho received his first art training in Washington, D.C., before further study in New York and Paris. Returning from France in 1887 the painter established a studio in New York City before moving again four years later to East Hampton. Journalist Charles Burr Todd had dubbed East Hampton “the American Barbizon” in 1882 as an artists’ colony was growing in the village, attracted by their desire to work directly from nature in an idyllic farming community. In "East Hampton Garden," Donoho depicts his own vegetable garden in a timeless view of pastoral beauty of the kind which continues to draw artists and tourists to Long Island’s East End.
Cows in a Landscape, 1867, oil on panel, Evelina Mount (1837-1920)
Healthy and content, five cows stand at the edge of a field next to a well. When settlers first arrived on Long Island in the seventeenth century, they had to contend with numerous predators killing their livestock, especially gray wolves. Various towns as well as Suffolk County offered bounties for every wolf killed. By the 1860s, farmers hadn’t worried about predators killing livestock in over a century. They would generally milk their cows twice a day, with the resulting milk either consumed raw or made into butter or cheese.
Girl with Pigs, 1831, oil on canvas, Henry Smith Mount (1802-1841)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1976. Taking care of farm animals was a daily responsibility for children in Stony Brook in the early nineteenth century. English farmers introduced pigs to Long Island two centuries earlier, where the intelligent, omnivorous, and hardy animals roamed the island, dining on everything from fallen acorns to shellfish exposed at low tide. These pigs are being raised for their meat, with these scenes inspired by either activity at the Mount farm or a neighboring one.
Boy with PigsThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Henry Smith Mount (1802-1841)
Boy with Pigs, 1831
Oil on canvas
Beef and GameThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Henry Smith Mount (1802-1841), Beef and Game, 1831, oil on canvas, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1976. Representing the wild and domestic bounty of Long Island, Henry Smith Mount’s "Beef and Game" may alternately tempt or turn off a viewer today for its frank depiction of dead waterfowl and a raw prime rib. But nineteenth-century audiences generally had a more intimate understanding of their food and its transformation from the field to the dinner table. While butchering cattle was a job best left to specialists, every rural family knew how to pluck and gut wild and domestic fowl.
Turning the Leaf, 1848, oil on panel, William Sidney Mount (1807-1868)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1958. Completed on December 8, 1848, Mount initially considered naming his latest painting "Surprise with Admiration" before deciding on "Turning the Leaf" the following day in his diary. Depicting a Long Island farm at the height of summer, two children discover a cache of chicken eggs at the base of a large tree. Chickens commonly roamed a farmyard and returned to a coop to sleep at night. Referring to the girl’s action and the popular idiom “turning over a new leaf,” these eggs are both the day’s latest discovery and the source for new life. However, these eggs are probably headed to the farmhouse kitchen.
Montauk FishermanThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Abraham Rattner (1893-1978), Montauk Fisherman, 1950, watercolor on paper. Working in the Hamptons in the 1940s and '50s, artist Abraham Rattner created this expressionist watercolor of a fisherman posing with a flounder. As New York State’s largest commercial fishing port then and now, the village of Montauk and its fishermen have been popular subjects for artists working in the East End since the nineteenth century. In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s the Long Island Railroad offered “Fisherman’s Special” trains that brought sport fishermen from Manhattan out to Montauk in the early morning, and back in the afternoon, with a special car to keep the fish they caught on ice.
Clamming at Shelter Island, 1878, oil on canvas, Frank Myers Boggs (1855-1926)
Born in Ohio, Frank Myers Boggs moved to New York as a teenager and first found work as a wood engraver. In his early twenties he traveled to Paris and studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After his return from France, Boggs evidently visited Long Island’s East End, where he witnessed African American men clamming in the choppy waters off Shelter Island. Standing in rowboats, the men each use a long-handled rake to collect clams lying in the mud perhaps a dozen feet below. The rakes have a basket above the teeth to catch the clams as the tool is dragged along the bottom.
Fish and Turtle, 1847, oil on panel, Shepard Alonzo Mount (1804-1868)
This wood turtle and four river herring (either alewives or blueback herring) show more of the wild aquatic food possibilities on Long Island. The herring spend two to three years in the Atlantic before returning to spawn in the tidal creeks of their birth. Though the fish are bony, commercial and recreational fishermen frequently catch and pickle them during spawning season. The wood turtle, identifiable by its reddish skin and the dark stripes on the plastron (the flat bottom plate of the carapace), is not a popular choice for a meal being only six to eight inches in length, but it’s possibly destined for a soup or stew.
Fish 3The Long Island Museum of American Art, History, & Carriages
Henry Smith Mount (1802-1841), Fish, 1831, oil on panel, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1975. The oldest of the four surviving Mount brothers, Henry owned a sign and ornamental painting shop in New York City when he took on William as an apprentice in 1824 for three years. He encouraged his younger brother to pursue a career as an artist, while continuing his own commercial and fine art painting. The latter included this still life of five striped bass suspended on a cord. Striped bass spawn in Long Island’s freshwater rivers, with the hatchlings maturing in the estuaries and bays before moving offshore as adults. They return to the rivers each spring to start the process anew. Since colonial times they’ve been an important recreational and commercial fish.
Exhibition Title: Edible Eden: The Art of Long Island's Forests, Fields, and Waters
Curated by The Long Island Museum
