Artwork story
About Still Life with Cake
The artist and artwork
Raphaelle Peale painted Still Life with Cake in 1818 on a wood panel. The eldest son of artist, scientist, and museum founder Charles Willson Peale, Raphaelle learned miniature painting, helped with his father's Philadelphia Museum, and shared the family's portrait business with his brother Rembrandt. After about 1812, however, he concentrated on still life, the genre for which he became best known. In this arrangement, cake slices, white-frosted pastries, green and dried grapes, leafy stems, and a glass of wine occupy a shallow tabletop space with almost portrait-like attention.
The world around it
The painting belongs to a young United States emerging from the War of 1812. Philadelphia was a growing port and manufacturing center, while new academies, museums, and public exhibitions were giving American artists places to study and show work at home. Economic expansion and imported goods changed what families could place on their tables, yet portraiture and grand historical subjects still carried greater prestige than still life. Peale's choice to specialize in food and household objects was therefore unusually focused. This picture may have appeared at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1819 under the descriptive title Still Life, Wine, Cakes, Grapes, &c.
A detail to notice
The abundance is carefully staged but never festive. No person reaches for the wine or cake; the fruit and pastries sit untouched against a dark, nearly empty wall. Peale signs and dates the panel along the front edge, making the bare shelf act almost like a nameplate. The Met describes a delicate melancholy in his tightly grouped still lifes and notes that his spare style may reflect Spanish still lifes he studied in Mexico, as well as paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán shown at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1818. The cake's cut faces, bright icing, translucent wine, and two kinds of grapes become a quiet study of surfaces, and of pleasures held just beyond use.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on wood and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 10 3/4 x 15 1/4 in. (27.3 x 38.7 cm).
Subject terms include Fruit, Grapes, Wine, Still Life, and Cakes. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1959.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
See the products currently available with this artwork. Product choices appear only when the exact item is published, in stock, and available to purchase.
