Six Pears 

Scott Fraser painted "Six Pears," a still life in oil, sometime after 1957. This is a study of everyday objects elevated to an art form and it has roots in the traditions of Dutch Golden Age painting. In seventeenth-century Netherlands, with the rise of a merchant class and a decline in religious commissions, artists turned to portraying the beauty of ordinary life. Fraser updates this by bringing highly realistic modern touches. You can see the pears have blemishes and aren't perfect. This imperfection mirrors modern life, and contrasts with the historical idealized representations of objects, people, and places. The pears are not arranged in a way to suggest abundance, rather a humbler array of edible produce. The tools of social history, such as studies of economics, trade, and class are useful in understanding the changing role of art, and how artists like Fraser comment on those changes.