When 33-year-old Deakin moved from Chicago to San Francisco in 1871, his older friend, Samuel Marsden Brookes, was already an established artist there. Here Deakin painted Brookes with a romanticized seriousness, set in a slightly ramshackle studio cluttered with half-finished canvases. The subject continues working uninterrupted on one of his signature fish paintings.

A self-taught master of the still life, Deakin combined in this painting his fascination for the light effects on the translucent red grapes and the Gothic-style carved stone arch that frames the fruit. In addition to its obvious visual appeal, the Flame Tokay table grape, a popular varietal in the late 19th century, was found most commonly in the warmer regions of California; the painting may have been meant as a tribute to the artist’s adopted state.

This painting, typical of the growing taste for fruit still lifes during the 1820s–1830s, offers a palette of contrasting colors displayed in peaches, pears, and multiple varieties of grapes. Some of the fruits sit in a bowl; others seem to spill across the surface of a table. The microscopic attention to detail shows Peale’s background as a painter of miniatures and a student of the natural sciences.

In The Meerschaum Pipe, a smoking pipe is mysteriously paired with what appears to be a small classified notice from a newspaper stuck to the wall. While any narrative relation between the two objects remains elusive, we as viewers are invited to create a story connecting them. As is often the case within Harnett’s oeuvre, the artist’s signature appears “carved” into the planar wood surface, which is rendered as meticulously as the picture’s subjects.

Brookes’s body of work mostly consists of the still lifes of game and fish for which he became well known and quite successful. The artist gave serious attention and rendered with painstaking skill the features of his captured animals. In this work, the small variations of color in the underside of the birds’ wings are particularly delicate, and the formality of the composition, with its classical oval backboard, gives the subject a timeless quality.

This painting originally found a home in a New York City saloon, where customers often debated which of the depicted objects were painted and which were actually real. Harnett’s popular pictures also hung in department stores and hotel lobbies, securing an artistic reputation for the painter beyond the walls of museums and galleries.

The foods in this painting—grape juice and bologna sandwiches—are shown as special things. They are, in fact, a meal from the homeless shelter that Ligare helped establish in Salinas, California. In ancient Greece, xenia described the guest-friend relationship. In 2012, Ligare wrote, “In my case, the bread and sandwiches depicted were exactly those served to homeless people in a soup kitchen where I volunteered in Salinas, California. They were literally xenia, or food gifts for strangers.”

In this still life, the artist shows an apple tree’s leaves and stems in every stage from freshness to decay, prompting the viewer to think about the cycle of life and death. The darkened leaves and stems contrast with the round, bright apples, which seem even more tempting and delicious by comparison.

This picture demonstrates Peale’s mastery of representational painting. He captured the likeness of the blackberry, a notoriously wild plant that is difficult to tame, capturing each individual berry with exuberance and animation. He preserves the fruit in a fixed state, so that its perfection will endure long after its model has withered.

The Cup We All Race 4 presents a visual rebus and pushes painting beyond representation to question the boundaries between reality and illusion. The central boards—with their hook and nails, tin cup, and incised letters—are painted on the canvas. But the painting’s frame is made of actual wooden boards, painted to match those depicted. The artist’s game is made even more convincing by the realistic scale of all these objects and the mysterious title.