Lemons and Pear is one of a series of canvases executed by Marsden Hartley in the summer and early fall of 1922 in his Berlin studio on Kantstrasse. These still life paintings (perhaps twenty of them), he reported to Alfred Stieglitz in a letter dated September 24, 1922, were mostly small but “the best painting I’ve ever done…true expression…devoid of all that extraneous passion.”[1] He found that close focus on still life objects (simple compositions of fruit lying on irregular shapes of drapery or on plates or baskets) was salutary in the midst of the chaos and monetary inflation of post-war Berlin, which he found to be “a bowlegged republic” devoid of art, literature, or music. In the same letter he mentions that he has begun to make lithographs of these fruit still lifes.

[1] Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz from Berlin, September 24, 1922, Stieglitz Collection, MS 85, Yale Collection of American Art, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.