Under the Shade of the Banyan Tree

Cool yourself in the shade of this intriguing painting by Peter Blume.

A 1911 immigrant to the United States, Blume studied at the Educational Alliance until 1921 and then at the Art Students League and the Beaux-Arts Academy in New York. Following brief jobs with a jewelry firm and a lithographic and engraving company, he struck out on his own in 1924, although he did agree to paint several post office murals for the government during the 1930s.

Blume's mature career stems from his figurative paintings of the late 1920s, and national recognition came in the 1930s with his anti-Fascist work, The Eternal City. Although often called a Magic Realist, Blume takes his imagery not from the domain of fantasy but from a world of familiar objects and landscape features forced into surreal relationships. Blume renders themes of human struggle and the decay of values in scenes of meticulous detail and suggests psychological dislocation by dramatically altering the relative scale of his subjects.

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987).

Pictured: Peter Blume, 1906 Russia–1992 USA, Banyan Tree, 1961, oil, 28 1/4 x 36 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc.