Lemon

Lemon is a subject in art. The gallery holds 88 works in this subject in art, including works by Édouard Manet, Pieter Claesz and Vincent van Gogh.

Few humble objects carry as much weight in Western painting as the lemon, which became a defining motif of seventeenth-century Dutch still life. In the Northern Netherlands the fruit was an exotic, costly import, shipped north from Mediterranean groves and unavailable from local orchards. Its presence on a table therefore signalled access to global trade at the height of the Dutch Golden Age, when Amsterdam's merchant wealth fuelled an unprecedented appetite for pictures. Studies of the period find lemons astonishingly common in Netherlandish painting—appearing in roughly half of surveyed works between 1500 and 1650, far more than in contemporary Italian art—as artists returned again and again to the fruit's luminous skin and acidic interior.

The signature treatment was the half-peeled lemon, its rind pared in a single continuous spiral that dangles over the edge of a table or pewter plate. This device let painters display bravura technique: the matte, dimpled exterior set against the glistening, translucent pulp, the curling peel casting delicate shadows. The art historian Svetlana Alpers observed that Dutch painters subjected both the outer and inner surfaces of such objects to a scrutiny that made viewers feel they had "never seen a lemon in this way before." In the lavish pronkstilleven, or ostentatious still life, the lemon nestled among Venetian glass, silver tazze, oysters and porcelain as a centrepiece of conspicuous luxury.

The motif also carried moral freight. Beautiful to behold yet sour to taste, the peeled lemon became a vanitas emblem—a reminder that earthly riches are seductive on the surface but bitter beneath, and that abundance, like cut fruit, swiftly decays.

The genre's masters are well represented in this collection. Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda pioneered the restrained "monochrome banketje," seen in Still Life with Peacock Pie and Banquet Piece with Mince Pie. Jan Davidsz. de Heem, a founder of the pronkstilleven, raised the form to opulent heights in works such as Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, while Abraham van Beijeren brought it sumptuous colour.

The lemon outlived its Baroque heyday. Severin Roesen carried Dutch profusion into nineteenth-century America, and Vincent van Gogh, painting Still Life of Oranges and Lemons with Blue Gloves in Arles in January 1889, reinvented the citrus study through expressive colour and impasto—an "air of chic," as he told his brother Theo.