Cauliflower, Radishes, and Tomatoes (Still Life with Cauliflower, Radishes and Tomatoes)

Inscriptions

Signed, in brown pigment, lower right: JH Cafferty 1862

Label

In these two still-life paintings, bountiful harvests seem to spill out of the picture frame. Painting during the Civil War, James Henry Cafferty features a late-summer crop bathed in golden light. Broad brushstrokes lend a lightness to the scene. Working thirty years later, Levi Wells Prentice used a much harder-edged style of painting, capturing the details of berries just plucked from the field. These two works suggest the expansion of American agriculture and the perception of the nation’s apparently endless natural resources.

From the 2026 exhibition Nurturing Nationhood: Artistic Constructions of America, 1790-1940, curated by Haely Chang (Jane and Raphael Bernstein Associate Curator of East Asian Art), Evonne Fuselier (Hood Museum Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow), Michael Hartman (former Jonathan Little Cohen Curator of American Art), Elizabeth Rice Mattison (Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programming and Curator of European Art), and Ashley B. Offill (Curator of Collections)

Course History

SART 25, Painting I, Esme Thompson, Fall 2014

Art History 38.04, Food and Art: Global History, Nicola Camerlenghi, Spring 2023

Art History 38.04, Food & Art: Global History, Nick Camerlenghi, Fall 2023

Exhibition History

James Henry Cafferty, N.A.(1819-1869), New-York Historical Society, New York, May 22-August 24, 1986, no.20.

Nurturing Nationhood: Artistic Constructions of America, 1790-1940, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; February 7-August 29, 2026.

Publication History

David Stewart Hull, James Henry Cafferty, N.A.(1819-1869), New-York Historical Society, New York, 1986, p.37.

Provenance

A Pennsylvania Family; Beverly and Ray Sacks, Inc., Cedarhurst, New York., until 1985; sold David Stewart Hull, 1985; bequeathed to Frank P. Stetz, New York, New York, 1998; given to present collection, 2004.

Catalogue Raisonne

Hull no. 125 (page 50 in catalogue raisonné section of David Stewart Hull, James Henry Cafferty, N.A. (1818-1869), New-York Historical Society, New York, 1986).

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