Wine, Cheese, and Fruit

A cut of pale cheese on a pewter plate, a glass of amber wine, and fruit set simply on a wooden tabletop against a plain wall — an unpretentious American table painted with a quiet exactness of light and texture. John F. Francis, a Philadelphia painter who had trained as a portraitist, turned to still life in the 1850s and became one of the best-known American painters of the genre in the decade before the Civil War; his wine, cheese, oyster and fruit pictures were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy and often commissioned by the taverns and hotels of the Philadelphia region. He signed and dated this canvas 1857. It descended through the Hubbard family of Findlay, Ohio, from Elizabeth Selden Hubbard before being sold at Christie’s, New York, in 1994 to the Art Institute, which purchased it with funds provided by Charles C. Haffner III and Mrs. Herbert Alexander Vance and the Wesley M. Dixon Jr. Fund. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.