Although many late nineteenth-century American artists portrayed poor city children in a sentimental manner that glossed over the harshness of their lives, Joseph Decker depicted the reality of poverty. Decker was born in Germany, the son of a carpenter, and immigrated to the United States in 1867 at the age of fourteen. The date in the lower right corner indicates that Decker produced this painting the next year, when he was only fifteen. The meticulous realism, in particular the vivid rendering of a variety of textures, shows Decker to have been extraordinarily precocious.
In this image, a youth dressed in ragged, dirty clothing sits on bundles of wood and roasts apples over a coal fire. An intriguing array of objects-a newspaper, tile, rusticated humidor, paint brushes, and the artist's calling card-are strewn across the mantelpiece. Artists generally placed calling cards in their pictures to draw attention to their skills; the inclusion of a card here suggests that the figure may represent the young Decker himself, struggling to earn a living in his newly adopted country. Or he may be a newsboy the artist hired to sit for him. Whether the youth is a model or a self-portrait, in this image Decker evoked the loneliness of poverty and the hunger that such a modest meal would not assuage.

This text was adapted from Carol Troyen and Janet Comey, "Children in American Art" (Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2007, in Japanese).

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