William Mason Brown (1828–1898)

WILLIAM MASON BROWN (1828–1898)
Strawberries Strewn on a Forest Floor, about 1865–70
Oil on canvas, 12 x 10 in.
Signed (with monogram, at lower right): WMB

As a former landscape painter, Brown was a staunch practitioner of another Ruskinian tenet—the still life placed in a natural setting—of which Strawberries Strewn on a Forest Floor is a prime example. In contrast to the more formal and traditional tabletop still life (which Brown also painted), Ruskin preached that fruit and flowers ought to be rendered as they exist in nature, relieved by soil or grass and other vegetation, and much like the works of the famous English painter William Henry “Bird’s Nest” Hunt. However, Barbara Dayer Gallati has noted a curious contradiction of Ruskinian theory in a similar work by Brown, Raspberries (oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.; The J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky), which depicts a loose bundle of raspberries set within an intimate space on the forest floor:

There is detectable in this painting, however, a duality in approach to nature that is antithetical to Ruskinian doctrine. The individual berries, the sheltering bush, the wild flowers, and grassy patch of earth are uniformly executed in a fashion comparable to that of Ruskin’s closest followers. Yet the berries do not appear as they would in nature; the artist’s hand has intervened in order to create a pleasing composition. This feature, along with the stage-like setting and theatrical lighting, introduces an artificial note which suggests that however veristic it all may seem, this is a composition that originated in the studio and not in nature (Gallati, “Raspberries,” in Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, exhib. cat. [New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1985],p. 92).

This apparent contradiction in Ruskinian theory is also seen in the present painting, which presents a loose group of rich red strawberries scattered about the forest floor.