Antique Oil Painting, “Children Eating Cherries in the Garden”, 1880

A charming oil on canvas genre painting depicting the innocence of youth, the subjects of this scene are two young children on a cherry farm. A young girl with light brown hair in pigtail braids, clad in a white blouse and garnet skirt, stands with her back to the viewer. She has a pair of cherries draped over her left ear as she feeds a second pair of fruit to the fair-haired boy in blue overalls before her. Both children stand barefoot in the lush green grass dotted with white, red, and yellow flowers, as some chickens forage the ground behind the boy. A man on a ladder can be seen even further back, picking cherries from a tree. The blue sky with pink and white clouds is barely visible, hidden by the thick canopy of trees and the large cream house with a brown roof behind the children. Signed and dated “D Meyer 1880” in the lower right-hand corner, the vertically aligned canvas is surrounded by a lovely giltwood frame with a textured lozenge background beneath foliate and floral margents.

Carl Diethelm Meyer was born in 1840 in Baden, Switzerland, in the canton of Aargau, near the German border. Meyer was persuaded to take up painting by his uncle, who was a well-known landscape painter. Still a teenager, Meyer became a student of the Swiss painter, Melchior Paul von Deschwanden. From 1858-1863, Meyer studied exclusively in Germany, before entering the famed École des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1864. In 1869, Meyer established himself as a genre and portrait painter in Munich, living the rest of his life there. Meyer’s works can be found all over Europe and the United States.