Strawberries in Landscape

In this delicate and diminutive painting, the artist Paul Lacroix frames a small stash of strawberries in the open air. The fresh picked bounty includes a few berries that do not appear as ripe as the others. As is a long-standing tradition with many still-life painters, the appearance of fruit gone bad, insects, or even skulls invoked themes of fleeting beauty and mortality. The placement of the fruit in a landscape, rather than in a dish or on a table, indicates the more current influence of the British art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). Ruskin urged that artists create a more natural setting for still-life paintings of fruit, vegetables, and flowers.