Levi Wells Prentice (American, 1851-1935) was born in Lewis County, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where he was raised on a farm and began his artistic career painting the surrounding landscape. Initially known for his depictions of the mountain terrain of Lewis County, as well as scenes near Buffalo and Syracuse, he later earned widespread recognition for his still lifes. After moving to Brooklyn in 1883, Prentice worked as a carpenter, frame maker, and art teacher while becoming active in the Brooklyn Art Association, where he frequently exhibited. Largely self-taught, he eventually shifted his focus almost entirely to still life painting, concentrating by the mid-1890s on meticulously rendered fruit subjects, especially his highly polished and crisply defined apples.

Prentice’s extraordinary command of color, texture, and illusionistic detail prompted art historian William H. Gerdts to describe certain works as achieving an unsurpassed level of realism. Prentice left Brooklyn in 1903; relatively little is documented about his later years, though his obituary appeared in Philadelphia newspapers in 1935. Today, his paintings are held in major museum collections, including the New York State Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Montclair Art Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.