C. P. Ream (1838–1917)
Still-life painter Cadurcis Plantagenet Ream, son of a country lawyer in Lancaster, Ohio, probably was self-taught when he began painting in the late 1850s. He was then living in Cleveland, but by 1866 he had moved to New York City, eventually sharing a studio there with his brother Morston, also a still-life painter. Around 1870, Ream began painting images reproduced as mass-market chromolithograph prints published by Louis Prang and Company of Boston. For a series of Prang “dessert pictures,” he painted tabletop displays of fruit and other food items amid luxurious containers and embroidered cloths; he also depicted groupings of single kinds of fruit in natural surroundings. Linked to a tradition of American still-life painting with roots in seventeenth-century Dutch art, these images testify to the material wealth and cosmopolitan aspirations of Americans in the Gilded Age.
During the 1870s, Ream often exhibited his work in the Brooklyn Art Association’s shows. He also participated in exhibitions in Cincinnati and at the Interstate Industrial Expositions in Chicago, where he moved in 1878, no doubt to take advantage of the city's burgeoning art market. In the following decade, Ream made several trips abroad. His itinerary included Munich, then a particularly popular destination for midwestern art students. Perhaps inspired by the dramatic brushwork and lighting characteristic of the so-called Munich School, during the 1880s Ream began painting in a somewhat looser manner. His use of natural settings in some works may reflect the influence of the American Pre-Raphaelite movement, whose adherents—many of them still-life painters—followed influential English art critic John Ruskin’s teachings of fidelity to nature.
In Chicago, Ream showed his work in several venues, including the Art Institute’s annual exhibitions beginning in 1894, and his paintings were carried by local dealers and sold in a series of auctions. In 1899, a local collector bequeathed one to the Art Institute; it was reported to be the first work by a Chicago artist to enter the museum’s collection. Solo exhibitions for Ream were held at the Art Institute in 1895 and 1909. By the turn of the twentieth century, Ream was widely regarded as the “king of fruit painters,”[i] but he also worked in other genres. He painted several portraits over the course of his career, and in the mid-1890s he took a temporary hiatus from still life to paint sentimental genre images, animal studies, and landscapes. Nevertheless, his reputation rested firmly on his talents as a still-life painter. Around 1902, Ream’s health declined and his production largely ceased.
[i] Giselle D’Unger, “The King of Fruit Painters,” Fine Arts Journal 16 (Oct. 1905): 428-31.
C. P. Ream, Plums, undated
Oil on canvas, 17 ⅜ by 25 ⅜ inches
Purple plums, grouped as if spilled at random onto the grassy ground, fill the center of C. P. Ream’s still-life painting. Uniform in size and color, the plums are positioned to offer multiple views of their rotund forms, with slender bright-green stems providing a contrast to dusky purple skins. Ream further varies the fruits through the use of shifting light. In the soft radiance of the foreground, the pale bloom on their skins appears a delicate blue, while undersides flush a dull red with reflected light. In the background, five plums glow an iridescent pink in a dramatic shaft of sunshine. Ream’s humble, casual subject serves as a lesson in close observation and its rewards: appreciation for the transient beauty and perfection of ordinary things.
A specialist in “fruit pictures” from the start of his career in the Civil War era, Ream followed a realistic still-life tradition characterized by exacting portrayal and moralizing overtones. As demonstrated in Plums, the artist’s mature work features somewhat looser brushwork, perhaps reflecting his awareness of more painterly styles current in Europe, notably in Munich, where he worked in the 1880s. Yet the composition of Plums, with the grouped fruit centered on the canvas and evenly framed on all sides, links this work firmly to established pictorial conventions.
Ream painted nearly every available kind of fruit, both in combinations and as single species. This work likely dates to the early or mid-1890s, when he made several closely related pictures of purple plums on the ground. Included in his 1895 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago were three, Plums, Plums—Sunlight Effect, and Plums—On Grass, of which this painting could be one. Another may well have been the 1895 canvas now titled Purple Plums, which is said to have been the first work by a Chicago artist to enter the Art Institute’s collection. By that time, Ream was a venerable figure on Chicago’s art scene and its acknowledged master of the still life.