A small oil painting still life of cut citrus fruit — and one of the most formally inventive still lifes in the collection. Where the pastel Still Life with Fruit (260) is relatively conventional in its arrangement and color, this work pushes the citrus subject toward near-abstraction. The cut sections of fruit are rendered with interior mark-making that bears little relationship to the actual structure of citrus flesh: green and red dabs within each white-edged section, blue outlines, passages of orange and rust that suggest the peel without describing it.
The whole painting has the quality of an object studied not for its appearance but for its capacity to hold color. Each fruit section becomes a vessel for Sidney's color vocabulary — green, red, orange, teal, pink — placed within the natural circular and segmented forms that citrus provides. The result is simultaneously a bowl of fruit and an exercise in how much color can inhabit a domestic object.
The ground is a pale teal-blue — neither tabletop nor sky but a color environment that surrounds and supports the fruit forms. The large orange-yellow form at upper left — the whole fruit before cutting — provides the conventional reference point that anchors the more abstract cut sections below it.
Signed Sidney Cathran Jr. in the lower right. The oil medium on canvas gives this a material richness that the watercolor still life lacks — the paint has body, the colors have depth, the fruit sections have genuine physical presence even as their representational accuracy dissolves into color play.