7000 Free Watercolors of Fruits and Vegetables

by Mireia Sanchez @mireia.sanchez

Be inspired by these 100-year-old watercolor paintings from the U.S. Department of Agriculture archives

If you like to paint fruit and vegetables in watercolor, get inspired by the Pomological Watercolors collection.

This digital archive, created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) at the end of the nineteenth century, includes a collection of around 7,500 paintings, mainly watercolors and lithographs, that you can download for free. Each watercolor includes the year and author of the painting and the scientific and common names of the fruit, vegetable, or plant depicted.

The collection is a brilliant source of inspiration and a great reference to help you create a mood board during your creative process. Read on to find out more about this list and how it came to be.

In 1886, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) invited a group of artists to collaborate on a unique project to document thousands of fruits and nut species that had just been discovered and were still unknown to most of the population.

Twenty-one artists (including nine women) illustrated various types and species deriving from 29 different countries and the 51 U.S. states. The watercolors and lithographs were included in the bulletins, annuals, and other USDA publications issued to farmers and gardeners all over the country. They became a valuable source of knowledge and a unique resource for the agricultural sector at the time. Today, thanks to digital technology, it can be consulted from anywhere.

What stands out in each composition is how precisely each fruit, vegetable, and plant feature has been depicted, thus proving how detailed watercolor painting is. This collection also reflects the value of naturalist and botanical illustrations for studying and categorizing all types of discoveries in this area.

The National Agricultural Library of the United States (NAL) is one of five national libraries and is the home of one of the largest collections dedicated to agricultural science. One of its goals is to give people access to all its historical documents.

The library’s digital collections, such as Pomological Watercolors, allow for further exploring of historical agricultural and food science resources. As current researchers can rely on other resources to study the environment, these watercolors are a significant source of inspiration for artists and illustrators of the natural world.

Fruit and vegetable watercolors for your mood board

All watercolor courses advise you to create your own mood board. You are encouraged to collect anything that inspires you and which can be used as reference material in your creative process. Let’s take these fruit and vegetable watercolors, for example. You can use them as a model or as a starting point to create your own versions.

Whatever you choose to do, you can practice with different brushes, colors, textures, and all the other details you’ll observe in the downloaded images.
Another challenge you can try is to illustrate both the exterior and each fruit or vegetable interior. If you are particularly interested in the botanical theme, you will also find many resources for practicing painting flowers and plants in watercolor.

Finally, these watercolors are also helpful in developing one of the most critical art skills: observation. Paying Vattention to each tiny detail (especially leaves and seeds) and identifying all the elements of each fruit, vegetable, and plant will help you create successful painting.

How can you find the watercolors?

The search area of the collection will allow you to explore the archive in depth. You simply need to write the name of the fruit, vegetable, or plant you are looking for or visit each page until you find an interesting painting. You will be able to download most of the images in high resolution.