June Floral Still Life

Evelina Mount was a member of the artistic Mount family of Stony Brook, Long Island. Mount painted floral still lifes, genre scenes, and landscapes featuring Long Island. Her father was Henry Smith Mount, a painter of signs and still lifes and an academician at the National Academy of Design. Portrait painter Shepard Alonzo Mount and the very successful genre painter William Sidney Mount were her uncles. After her father died in 1841, her uncle William Sidney Mount became her mentor, encouraging Mount’s study, offering her advice, and introducing her to the New York art scene. She subsequently studied with the Hudson River School artist James M. Hart in 1867 and 1868. Between 1871 and 1878, she exhibited seven pictures at the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design, six of which were floral subjects. In 1874, she also exhibited a painting at the Academy of Design in Chicago. Most of Mount’s paintings were gifted to friends and family members rather than sold and by the 1890s, she had ceased painting. “June Floral Still Life” depicts flowers haphazardly strewn on a tabletop, a popular convention for floral arrangements at mid-century.