Private Collection, Massachusetts

According to Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., “During the spring of 1866 or 1867 [Martin Johnson Heade] must have made a now-unlocated oil sketch of a branch of flowering apple blossoms, for it appears in varying guises in one small painting after another until the early 1880s” (The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, 2000, p. 128).  Apple Blossoms in A Corner, painted in 1868, is the earliest known example of a flowering apple blossom branch perched on a ledge.  In the early and mid-1860s, Heade created a series of paintings depicting flowers both alone and in vases resting on polished wooden ledges; by 1870, he began painting floating branches of flowers against monochromatic backgrounds.