Strange Fruit

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Fruit-symbol of fertility and abundance- in Cranach's painting (Lucas the Elder) Cupid Complaining to Venus-and in Keats' poem...

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”Keats

 

Crivelli's paintings of the Madonna always exhibit Fruit entwined in elaborately bizarre bunting.

 

  "Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb."- Jean Arp

 

Botanists and painters have been splitting open Fruit in examination and inspiration for centuries. In the 18th century Johann C. Volkcamer illustrated exotic citrus fruits growing in Volckamer's Nuremburg home. Somewhat surreal-Volkcamer's colossal fruit & Baroque banners with names in Latin, are suspended over landscapes, villas and gardens in Nuremberg and Northern Italy. 

 

 

"Nurenbergische Hesperides, the thorough description of the noble Citron, used in within and neighbouring area, praised Lemon, and Orange fruits, like such, be received and carried away, velvet of a detailed dicription of most sorts, which some were brought to Nuremberg actually grown, others by different strange places there... " Volkcamer

 

 

  

 "Before thee stands this fair Hesperides, With golden Fruit..." Shakespeare

the MODERN HESPERIDES

  (photographs of Penelope Tree top, center Tim Walker, and below Irving Penn)

The HESPERIDES, three daughters of Hesperus, tended the beatific orchard of Hera in a far western corner of the world.

 

 

 

  "But the fruit that can fall without shaking, Indeed is too mellow for me."  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

 

Flowers and Fruit of the Pomelo, a Branch of Henna, and a Flying Lizard, by Marianne North

 

 Marianne North at Mrs. Cameron's house in Ceylon,

photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron

 

porcelain Lychee Branch with Moth by Carmen Almon above, and below, Purple Plum Branch with Green Moth

 

From table-to cabinet to dressing table, Howard Slatkin's artful placement of Fruit throughout his apartment bring magical spots of citrusy color into his rooms.

 

(photographs by Tria Giovan from Slatkin's book Fifth Avenue Style)

 

“Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed. -- Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.” Nietzsche

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