Born and trained in Cologne, Germany, Severin Roesen was one of the America’s finest still life painters at the middle of the 19th century. While his arrangements developed in parallel to those of the Peale family, he owed much stylistically to the Dutch tradition of still life painting, to which he was likely exposed through the work of the Düsseldorf painter Johann Preyer. Emigrating to the United States in 1848, he quickly set to work establishing himself as a dedicated still life artist, his virtuosic renderings of fruit, glowers, and a characteristic pilsner glass filling the growing American appetite for allegories of its growing productivity in the years before the Civil War. After an initial period in New York, the painter left a wife and children there for the mining and lumber towns of central Pennsylvania, where he likely spent the rest of his life. His 24-year American career, from his arrival in 1848 to his final dated canvas in 1872, displays an increasingly sophisticated and idealized conception of still life, with every flower, goblet and leaf arranged and polished to a perfection that was highly valued in the aesthetics of the day.