Still Life with Plums by Scottish painter David Foggie (1878-1948) presents a close view of an assorted group of fruits, including a single lemon, plums scattered about and in a bowl, as well as green apples on the right side and partially out of view. There is another vessel in the background, cut off at the top of the canvas. Characteristic of other still lifes, the overall colour tones are darker, with the lightest parts of the piece in the centre. Thick, criss-crossing layers of paint are visible in making up the lemon, showing the impressionistic way Foggie captures the objects. Foggie captures light and dark in the plums, using deep shades of purple and then laying over small strokes and specks of lighter blueish purple to loosely capture the roundness of the plums. The majority of the oil paint in this painting is built up in layers, seen in the shading of the bowl with how less of the canvas's texture comes through the paint.

Still lifes are not characteristic of Foggie's work, but show the attention to loosely capturing details that comes across in his portraits, with layers of paint overlaid and blended together to create shadows within a figure. The blending of colours to create life-like tones of the fruit is notable and likely contributed to Foggie being a well-known teacher of art in Scotland. 

David Foggie RSA RSW, 1878-1948

Born in Dundee, Foggie studied in Paris, Antwerp and Italy. The artist George Dutch Davidson, the most talented of the east-coast contemporaries of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, became a close friend of his in Dundee. They studied together, although Foggie was less influenced by the Celtic and Symbolist movements than Davidson.
Foggie painted portraits and figures in an assured manner, and was in demand as a robust yet elegant portrait painter between the wars. He was an accomplished draughtsman and taught drawing at Edinburgh College of Art. His contemporaries considered him a painter's painter.