Wrapped Oranges
Object Description
Between 1877 and 1882, McCloskey trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, who encouraged his students to make still-life paintings of fruit to better understand relationships of color and light. But McCloskey painted oranges only after moving to Los Angeles, where the citrus industry was rapidly growing. He opened a studio there with his wife, the painter Alberta Binford McCloskey, and embarked on a series of small canvases that portray oranges wrapped in wax paper and laid out on polished mahogany tables, including Wrapped Oranges. Wax-paper wrapping became popular in the 1880s as a new way of preventing fruits from rotting during shipping. With wax paper, oranges, once a luxury commodity, became more broadly accessible and affordable to Americans across the country.
—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)
Object Details
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Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and CuisineFebruary 22–May 18, 2014
This mouthwatering exhibition of 60 paintings explores the art and culture of food, investigating the many meanings and interpretations of dining in America, from celebrating the pleasures of eating to making a statement on the country’s social values.
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American Still LifeFebruary 14–August 16, 2015
Organized in celebration of a recent acquisition, American Still Life highlights the ability of 19th and 20th-century American artists to celebrate the ordinary through their paintings, whether trompe l’oeil masters or modernist photographers.
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Teacher Resources
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What is a still life?
How might an artist employ specific compositional devices to elicit a particular experience for the viewer?
What factors might influence the objects an artist chooses to depict and the way they represent them?
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Grades 4–12
After creating still life in the activity for all levels, pair students to write a response to one another’s work. Have them consider the compositional and medium choices, as well as the context, that each student provided for the objects.
All Levels
Choose two or three examples of still lifes created with similar objects and ask students to compare the works. What decisions did each artist make in the way they treated and contextualized the object(s)? Offer students the opportunity to create a still life of their own using similar objects.