Edwin Deakin

Edwin Deakin is best known for two things: paintings of California’s old Spanish missions and still lifes of grapes. His grapes, heavy bunches hanging against old adobe or stone walls, were very popular in his day and much copied.

He was born in Sheffield, England, in 1838 and moved to the United States as a young man, settling in San Francisco around 1870. He painted the Sierra Nevada and the California landscape, and made a series of paintings of all twenty one Spanish missions, which drew public attention to the need to restore them. He moved to Berkeley in 1891 and died there in 1923. His work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Crocker Art Museum.

Grapes against a Mission Wall joins his two favourite subjects in one picture. Look at the translucent fruit and the rough, sunlit plaster behind it.