Lemon by Toby Sonneman

Author:Toby Sonneman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

America’s Innocent Refreshment

The American painter Raphaelle Peale, in the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life artists, paid homage to a well-matched duo in his Lemons and Sugar (1822), showing a decorated porcelain sugar bowl next to a basket of golden lemons. The lemons in Peale’s painting, like those in Dutch art centuries before, represented something rare and valuable – and most likely imported. Until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, American lemonade was often made with foreign lemons.

Citrus is not native to the Americas and had been un known until Columbus brought lemon, orange and citron seeds from the Canary Islands to Haiti on his second voyage, in 1493. The Caribbean climate was so favourable that orchards swelled into citrus forests within a few generations. The Portuguese brought lemons to Brazil by 1540, and in 1788 the captain of the First Fleet of British colonists carried lemon trees from Rio de Janeiro to Australia. Spanish explorers and colonists introduced citrus to Florida by the mid-1500s, but commercial culti vation in Florida and California did not begin until the mid-1800s, and Florida’s lemon industry collapsed in the mid-1890s after a disastrous freeze.

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