Donald Sultan — Lemons For Sale

Lemons | Donald Sultan | Guy Hepner, New York

Market Performance

Sultan's lemon works have achieved strong results at auction across multiple colourways. Black Lemon on Yellow and Yellow Lemon on Black have both achieved US$12,500. Eight Whites has realised US$10,802.

About the Series

The lemon is one of the great subjects of Western still life painting — from Chardin to Manet, a motif carrying centuries of art historical resonance. Sultan began painting lemons in 1983, and the subject quickly became one of his most recognized motifs, approached with the same combination of formal directness and material weight he brings to all of his botanical subjects.

In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a solo exhibition titled "Donald Sultan's Black Lemons," pairing his large-scale Black Lemon aquatints with a related series of charcoal drawings. MoMA's permanent collection includes Black Lemons (1984–85), a series of four aquatints, each sheet measuring roughly 62 x 48 inches — an early and important benchmark for the motif in Sultan's print practice. Later lemon prints, such as Black Lemon on White and Yellow Lemon on Black (2018), are color silkscreens combining enamel inks with Sultan's signature tar-like texture, rendered as stark, high-contrast silhouettes against contrasting fields. The Asheville Art Museum, in Sultan's home city, holds a Four Lemons suite (2018), screenprints with enamel inks on museum board, each panel measuring 39 x 39 inches.

Sultan's lemon works are among the most formally spare in his print production: the fruit rendered as near-geometric form against fields of contrasting colour, with the tar-inflected surface lending each work an unusual density and physical presence despite the simplicity of the image. The series is particularly prized by collectors who respond to Sultan's more reductive mode — a stripped-back counterpoint to the larger, more elaborate Poppies and Lantern Flowers that dominate his print catalogue.