David Emil Joseph de Noter
1818–1892
Fruit and Flowers, 19th century
Oil on canvas, 32 x 27 in.
Bequest of Charles Knox Smith
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Please double-click the arrow above to hear Diane Pastella, Woodmere’s Assistant to the Director, talk about what these flowers have to say.
David Emil Joseph de Noter lived and worked in Brussels. His lush still lifes, with their dramatic arrangements of brilliantly colored flowers, fruits, seashells, and sometimes animals and birds, were popular throughout Europe and the United States. He was showered with honors in the most prestigious institutions of the arts in Paris and London.
I appreciate the 3 dimensionality of the painting. The bouquet has a back, a side, a bottom – and it stuffs into the pail and has a flower or 2 that seem to fall in a tired faint showing against the blue of the pail. The light glows from the triangle of blooms in the center, but is picked up again by the fruit in the forground and the white diagnol object (a fruit knife?) that points back to the main middle ground of the painting. Although it is a lovely painting, the flowers are past their prime and no longer beautiful.