Winning Bid: An Apple for the Day

On Saturday afternoon, Dear Reader, I was the successful bidder at Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York, on a small American painting of an apple sitting on a pink-rimmed Paris porcelain plate.

A pretty little painting of an apple on a plate,
hanging on the wall of the dining room at Darlington House

I don't think my "new" painting is particularly old—it was probably painted no more than twenty or thirty years ago, if that—but it is done in an old-fashioned, realist style.  Enhancing the painting's early appearance is its attractive, plain, early nineteenth-century gilt frame.

A New York apple sitting on the table in
our kitchen at Darlington House

If one were to squint, one might think my little picture could have been painted in the first half of the nineteenth-century, in the manner of one of the Peales.

With the addition of a sprig of leaves from a crab apple tree inserted
into our apple (camera trickery!) and a Paris porcelain plate,
we have mimicked the painting

I bought the little picture for our dining room at Darlington House, where we have hung it underneath an early nineteenth-century painting of a basket of fruit.  It is the perfect complement to the older painting.

The surface of the painting measures only six by eight inches

I am pleased to own this charming little still life.  I was drawn to it given my fondness for the subject matter—an apple and Paris Porcelain—which I have written about repeatedly here on Reggie Darling.  I was happy that I could bring the picture home with me (and at what I consider to be a most reasonable hammer).  And I am glad that it now hangs in our dining room where it is the finishing touch to the room's decoration.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick