Joseph Decker (1853-1924)
Between 1879 and 1880, Decker studied at the Royal Academy in Munich under Wilhelm Lindenschmidt (1806 to 1848). According to William Gerdts, Decker’s Munich training had a profound impact upon his work. “In one conspicuous sense, the artist Decker who came back from Munich was not the Decker who had arrived there a year earlier. On his return, Decker was a still life painter. He….preferred still lifes of edibles – especially fruit” (Joseph Decker 1853 – 1924: Still Lifes, Landscapes and Images of Youth, New York 1988, n.p.). Decker exhibited these works at the National Academy of Design between 1882 and 1888, as well as at the Brooklyn Art Association (1883 – 1884), the Society of American Artists (1887) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1888).
Although still life was a predominant theme in American art at this time, Decker managed to present the commonplace still life genre in a unique manner. “Decker found a unique approach in their presentation…(in their)close-up, intensely detailed, and compacted compositions of usually growing fruit as well as of nuts and hard candies” (ibid, n.p). Still Life with Grapes and Peaches is one of Decker’s largest known still lifes. The attractive detail in this work shows Decker’s crispness of detail and chromatic scale in the “glowing dark-blue grapes acting as a counterpoint to the lighter richness of peaches.” Still Life with Grapes and Peaches fits well within this 1880′s tradition but also suggests a transition and development of Decker’s style in the softening of the composition overall. According to Bruce Chambers, “…the edges of the fruit are softly painted, relying more on color contrast than on line for their differentiation… Decker has taken great care to capture the surface patina of each piece of fruit – the bloom on grapes, the fuzz on peaches.”