Lot 1213: Thomas Badger American, 1792-1868 Still Life

Thomas Badger
American, 1792-1868
Still Life
Signed Painted by T. Badger (ll)
Oil on panel
18 1/4 x 24 inches

Thomas Badger, trained by the Boston ornamental artist, John Ritto Penniman, was a well-regarded portrait painter and miniaturist. Born in Massachusetts, he worked most of his life in Boston, while making frequent trips to Maine where he was active from the 1830s through the 1850s. Badger exhibited portraits at the Boston Athenaeum's annual exhibitions, as well as New York's National Academy of Design. He died in nearby Cambridge.

Badger's portraits are competent, professional works but it is his small body of still-life paintings that, in recent years, have garnered serious attention from scholars, collectors, and museums. Professional still-life painting began in America only in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and for the first twenty years was practiced almost entirely only by members of Philadelphia's famous Peale family, especially by Raphaelle Peale, his uncle James Peale, and by several of James's daughters, most notably Sarah Miriam and Margaretta Angelica Peale. Just about no other American painter of the first three decades of the nineteenth century devoted him- or herself to traditional still-life painting, and only rare examples of the theme are known by a few artists such as John Archibald Woodside, Robert Street, John Johnston, and Charles Bird King.

The one exception to this paucity of still-life painting is the work of Thomas Badger. Though the number of his still lifes remains rare - he was, after all, primarily a portrait painter - a solid body of work in this genre has emerged, and offers true distinction, both constituting a personal aesthetic and one very different from the contemporaneous work of the Peale family. Though Badger could have seen work by James and Raphaelle Peale at the exhibitions held at the Boston Athenaeum beginning in 1827, he appears to have evolved his own approach to the subject long before such works were available to him. Furthermore, Badger's still lifes exhibit characteristics inimical to the Peale tradition. Though like the Peales, he concentrated on fruit subjects - flower pictures would not become popular in America until the later 1840s - Badger's compositions are much fuller and more lush than those of the Peales. While the Peales strove for simplicity, Badger presents abundance. Furthermore, while the typical Peale still life arrangement rests on some kind of board or elongated table - there is no way to tell for sure the nature of the support for their subjects - Badger preferred a variety of more "elegant" supports - sometimes crisply painted, immaculately white tablecloths, sometimes a well-polished wooden table, or, as here, a thick piece of grained gray marble, which in turn rests upon a handsome wooden support. In addition to the bright, even glowing depiction of the fruit he painted, especially distinctive was Badger's introduction of two favorite fruit motifs - the sliced watermelon but even more, the "bomb"-like form of the melon, inserted on a diagonal, which may almost be considered the artist's signature.

Badger appears to have begun painting still lifes early in his career, and may even have considered choosing this as a direction for his artistry along with portraiture (he is known to have painted portraits as early as 1814). He began exhibiting fruit still lifes at the American Academy of the Fine Arts in New York City in 1817, and continued to do so in 1819 and again in 1826. The earliest dated still life by Badger to come to light today was completed in January 1818, contemporary with Raphaelle Peale and before James Peale turned to this theme. Though relatively few in number, Badger was certainly the earliest Boston artist to be attracted to the still-life subject and all those which have come to light exhibit a mastery of the theme. Whether he continued to paint still-lifes throughout his career is not known; Badger has not yet been the subject of extensive scholarship, except for an exhibition and catalogue of the portraits he painted in Kennebunk, Maine, held in 1964, for which a small catalogue was published. He did exhibit fruit pieces at the early Boston Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts in 1841 and again in 1847, though whether these were recent works or pictures he had painted early in his career is not known. The respect and admiration for Badger's contribution to the art of still-life painting in America finds testimonial in their representation in such institutions as the Colby College Museum of Art, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.

This is, indeed, a rare and worthy example of American still-life painting.

William H. Gerdts, September 2008

We are grateful to William H. Gerdts, author of American Still Life Painting and Senior Advisor in American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, for contributing this catalogue essay.