Eggplant

Charles Demuth often painted watercolor still lifes of fruits, vegetables, and flowers from the farmer’s market in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. These delicately-colored depictions of nature’s bounty contrast boldly with his cubist-influenced architectural landscapes. While retaining his fascination for linear design, he minimized his rational, two-dimensional approach and emphasized the sensuous nature of the objects he represented.

Eggplants in particular were a favorite motif of Demuth’s between 1922 and 1927. In contrast to his early, more “baroque” still lifes, this particular composition, is a restrained image with subdued colors and flattened planes. Demuth’s flowing pencil line defines the curves and irregularities of the eggplant, peach, and melon, while his blotting technique evokes the textures and the light reflecting off of their surfaces. Set upon an abstractly rendered tabletop, the foods cast overlapping shadows that heighten the complexity of the image. Subtly tinted with the soft colors of the fruits and vegetables, these shadows, along with the table’s edges, form an abstract pattern around the still life. Vertical lines having no basis in reality extend from the eggplant and counter the strong diagonal of the table. With these devices, Demuth retained in Eggplant some of his instinct for design, despite the naturalistic representation of the still-life elements.

The linear qualities and the pale, translucent color and light of Eggplant reveal Demuth’s enduring admiration for Cézanne’s watercolors. Duncan Phillips believed that Demuth’s “crafty elimination and wise selection, with ruled lines and jewelled, blotted washes” made his watercolors “original American contributions of…enduring quality.”