The Irish Question

Inscriptions

Signed "S.S. David" at lower left

Provenance

Shannon's FIne Art Auctioneers, Milford, CT, April 2001, lot 53. Christie's, New York; purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago at auction, December 4, 2003, lot 49.

Exhibition history

Art Institute of Chicago, Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, Nov. 10, 2013–Jan. 27, 2014, cat. 15; Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Feb. 22–May 18, 2014.

Publications

Judith A. Barter, "True to the Senses and False in Its Essence: Still–Life and Trompe l'Oeil Painting in Victorian America," Museum Studies 31, no. 1 (Art Institute of Chicago, 2005): 39 (ill.). Judith Barter et al., Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 146–48, 223, cat. 15, fig. 7 (ill.).

Quick Overview

Artist: De Scott Evans / American, 1847–1898
Date: 1880s
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 30.5 × 25.4 cm (12 × 10 in.)
Type: Painting
Classification: painting
Style: Realism
Place: United States
Department: Arts of the Americas
Credit line: Purchased with funds provided by Carol W. Wardlaw and Jill Burnside Zeno; Roger and J. Peter McCormick Endowment Fund
Accession no.: 2004.3

Data retrieved from the Art Institute of Chicago on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.