Throughout history, especially from the 18th century to the beginning of World War II, artists have produced a remarkable wealth of graphic representations of fruit. This volume includes paintings by American artists, including the Peale family, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton, engravings and lithographs by major printmaking companies like Currier and Ives, botanical illustrations, and excerpts from vintage nursery catalogs. Find hundreds of illustrations, chosen to arouse physical and aesthetic appetites. These include still lifes, photographs, and amusing antique postcards, as well as expert botanical and historical information. Fruit you know and some you may not are illustrated here in unique works of art or artefacts. They include standards like apples, cherries, and grapes, tropicals such as bananas, mangoes and avocados, biblical fruits, including pomegranates, dates, and olives, and rare delicacies like medlars, persimmons, prickly cactus pears, and pawpaws. Fruit has never looked this good. AUTHOR: Emery was born in Eastern Pennsylvania to a family with deep agricultural roots. Logan Emery Sr., Lewis (Mike) Emery, and Hazel (Emery) Alexander regaled Mike with their stories of growing up on the large family farm of C. Ralph and Rachel (Umble) Emery in north-eastern Chester County. They weren't fruit farmers, but every farm family had a few apple trees. Mike's great grandfather, Ralph, made cider. A great grandmother, Elizabeth Diem, continued to make apple butter into old age. Mike prides himself on his prowess as a baker of apple pies, which he makes using ancestral redware pie plates, with time blackened bottoms. Richman was born in New York City and summered in New York's Catskill Mountains. In the City he became familiar with the decorative labels on fruit crates when he went with his mother and grandmother to do their fruit and vegetable shopping at the outdoor stands and pushcarts of Prospect Place in Brooklyn. In the Catskills he ate apples from trees along country roads, picked wild strawberries and blueberries and actually tended a small orchard ? apple, pear, plum, cherry, and peach ? at his family's home in Woodbourne, New York. He also became cast under the spell of nursery catalogs ? a lifetime intoxication. He holds a compote of fruit made from Italian Majolica ? a tin-glazed earthenware. 415 colour photographs
