USDA releases thousands of historical watercolors of American fruit and nut cultivars for free download

Arkansas Black apples paintings from 1895 to 1921. More than half the images in the USDA archive are apples.

Between 1886 and 1942, the Agriculture Department commissioned artists to document quickly changing fruit and nut cultivars across the United States at a time when color photography wasn't widely available, Sebastian Smee reports for The Washington Post. A recently published book features many of them, but the USDA has also made the more than 7,500 paintings in its Pomological Watercolor Collection available to the public, downloadable in high resolution to capture every gorgeous detail.

Yenjerto bananas; most bananas sold
today are Cavendish (USDA image)

The most striking aspect of the collection is the "extraordinary diversity" of the cultivars. That's comforting at a time when broad cultural forces often drive us toward homogeneity, in cuisine and elsewhere, Smee writes: "You probably won’t find Arkansas black apples, Coloway mulberries or Belle Angevine pears in your local supermarket ... So to be reminded, as this book does, of the astonishing diversity to be found in a sphere that uniquely combines nature and culture is uplifting. Long live the Fraud plum, the Golden Gate strawberry, the Memory grape, the Chinese Shaddock pumelo, the Wagner avocado, the Paradise banana, the Dancy tangerine and the Lisbon lime. Let their irregular shapes, their unique aromas, their blushing colors and their gorgeous names remind us of all that we stand to lose if we don’t value precisely what is strange, singular, foreclosed upon and factored out." Read more here.