MURA · THE COLLECTION · HENRY LEE MCFEE

Fruits and Flowers

A still life by the American painter Henry Lee McFee, dated 1927 and bought by the Cleveland Museum of Art the following year. The canvas measures 51.5 by 77 centimetres and was purchased from the J. H. Wade Fund. It came from the Rehn Gallery in New York, where McFee had his first one-man show in 1927.

Henry Lee McFee · 1927 · Oil on canvas · America · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The museum's record gives the title, date, medium and size but no descriptive text. Mura's catalogue describes soft fruit, bright flowers and pale ceramics gathered against folds of silver-grey fabric. Nothing more should be read into the picture than that; the museum has not published an interpretation.

How it was painted

McFee (1886–1953) was born in St. Louis. According to Wikipedia, an inheritance in 1907 allowed him to enrol at the Stevenson Art School and paint full-time; two summers at the Art Students League's classes in Woodstock, New York, under L. Birge Harrison, shaped him strongly. In 1919 he was among the founders of the Woodstock Artists' Association, and his work, described there as influenced by Cubism and Synchromism, was shown at the Carnegie Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy, the Corcoran Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. His first one-man show was at the Rehn Gallery in 1927, the year this painting is dated. No source consulted describes his working method for this particular canvas.

Where it went

The painting passed from the Rehn Gallery, New York, to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which purchased it from the J. H. Wade Fund in 1928, accession number 1928.258. It was listed in the museum's Eighth Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings in June and July 1928, returned to the Rehn Galleries for an exhibition of McFee's paintings in March and April 1929, and appeared in Cleveland's "Exhibition of American Painting from 1860 Until Today" in 1937. In 2002–03 it travelled to San Diego and El Paso for "Idol of the Moderns: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American Painting". It is currently not on view.

Why it is in Mura

It sits in the Gardens & Still Life collection with the mood "warm": fruit, flowers and cloth, arranged for the pleasure of arrangement.