Upset
Joseph Decker (ca. 1887)
Have you ever found beauty in a mistake or accident?
The title of this painting playfully describes the state of an overturned container. We are invited to look carefully at the spilled contents of a white open box. In this tightly compact, horizontal image, a dizzying variety of candies are proffered for the viewer: multicolored and variously shaped, shiny, jellied, sugar-encrusted, caramelized, cubed and ovoid, candied, paper-wrapped, transparent, and opaque.
\ Artist
Joseph Decker
American
Born:
1853
Died:
1924
Death place:
Brooklyn, New York
Among German-born artist Joseph Decker’s specialties was the highly illusionistic representation of boxes or baskets displaying beautiful, fanciful content. Whether depicting dozens of apples or cherries, a variety of candy, or other trinkets intended to dazzle the eye and pique the senses, these pictures speak to the increased commodification of consumer tastes—for both sweets and painting—during the latter part of the 19th century.
\ About
Medium
Oil on canvas
Credit
Gift of Alfred V. Frankenstein