Strawberries and Peaches

Sarah Baker studied with several leading modern American painters before winning a scholarship in 1923 to study painting abroad in Paris. Because she was essentially a post-impressionist whose primary influences were French painters (artists such as Chardin and Matisse were favorites), Baker’s work often felt at loose ends in an artistic climate shifting greatly towards abstraction and Cubism. Her early work especially showed the considerable influence of Cézanne, but she later developed her own identifiable style. The brushing, the directional stroking of the paint, the broken color, the particular character of the line—each of these attributes defines her individuality.

This little painting, Strawberries and Peaches, is a typical and successful example of how she applied her own style to the still-life theme. The red-checked cloth establishes the pulsating planes of this painting; line describing contour is continuously being negated by short strokes of the brush. There is the sense of the occurrence of the objects on the canvas surface, not merely their placement there. The noticeable decrease of color intensity toward the top of the picture combined with the understated edge of the table at the bottom provides a melting pot of moving blocks of color where objects seem to be in the process of either being absorbed into or borne on the painting’s surface.