REVIEW : A new exhibition canvasses a variety of privately owned works that aren’t often publicly accessible.

Raphaelle Peale’s gorgeous 1814 still-life “A Dessert,” which hangs at the entrance to a fine new show of American painting recently opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is more than just a picture of an after-dinner treat. As both an image and an object of delectation, the painting is also emblematic of a commitment to a cultured life.

The painting shows a small carafe and a wine glass flanking a white porcelain dish, which holds some fruits and nuts--citrus, raisins, almonds, walnuts. The carafe and wine glass are marked by a simple, sturdy elegance, neither overly showy nor designed with only function in mind. Likewise, the shallow porcelain bowl is undecorated, save for a gently scalloped edge that creates a sinuous counterpoint to the dramatic spheres of fruit it holds.

Peale has chosen to bring your eye down to the level of the plain tabletop on which the dessert is laid out, creating warmth and intimacy. Resting on an ample bed of almonds, the fruit is abundant--oranges and a lemon whose dimpled skin is painted with all the care of the most delicate portrait, and wrinkly raisins cascading artfully out of the dish. Still, the foodstuffs are not plentiful to the point of ostentation.

The setting is universalized, the picture’s background a rich, unadorned brown, against which the citruses glow like bright suns. An indication of the particular room in which the picture was painted has to be searched out: A four-paned window’s small reflection glows in the glass carafe. But even that is generic. The location is everywhere and nowhere.

“A Dessert” is a modest yet elegant display, at once genteel, simple and humble in its offerings, but not without its quiet luxuriance. The picture is even modest in size--just over 13 inches high and 19 inches long--while its refined surfaces are exquisite.

Because it is an ornament, keyed to providing sensual gratification and delight, the painting as an object is not unlike the still-life it depicts. Remember that the still-life shows dessert--the added fillip of pleasure at the end of a repast--rather than the food essential to sustaining life. The painting’s inescapable moral tone of humility extends to a consideration of life’s rewards as much as to its necessities.

For such a small picture, Peale’s painting can hold your eye and mind for a very long time. And it is but the first among 72 other works in the show, which broadly surveys “American Paintings in Southern California Collections: From Gilbert Stuart to Georgia O’Keeffe.” By no means does all of what follows measure up to the Peale; still, so many gems are sprinkled through the galleries that, on a picture by picture basis, the exhibition is unusually satisfying.

Take the big extravagant still-life by Severin Roesen, which couldn’t be more different from Peale’s modest essay in moral virtue. Roesen’s sumptuous painting isn’t dated, but the artist wasn’t even born until a year or so after Peale’s picture was made. It’s from considerably later in the still-new life of the United States.

Roesen’s tabletop is hardly simple: Made of marble, its two tiers create a decidedly ostentatious display that makes you step back to take it all in. Relatively large--more than 3 feet high and almost 2 1/2 feet wide--the painting sports a vertical orientation that reflects the viewer standing before it. The result is a feeling of formal address.

What is the painting announcing? Well, think of every opposite of humility and you’ll be on the right track.

Like the Peale, the Roesen shows a wine glass, but this one is not a simple flute. Instead, an elaborate goblet filled with golden wine is perched upon an ornamented stem.

The Roesen features a porcelain bowl, too, although this one mimics a woven basket held high above a fragile base encrusted with porcelain flowers. The bowl doesn’t contain dried grapes but lush and rosy strawberries.

Speaking of fruit, consider the rest of the produce list depicted: peaches, apples, plums, three kinds of grapes (purple, green, golden), watermelon, cherries, raspberries and a lemon. They cascade down the tiered table like a mighty river of plenty, a veritable Niagara of abundance.

Roesen had been duly tutored in the fashionable art of 17th century Dutch still-life painting, always a favorite of the bourgeois merchant class, and his bacchanalian picture demonstrates some of the genre’s standard features. There’s the Dutch-style goblet and the cut lemon at the center of the picture, its bitter, spiraling peel a symbol of the relentless passage of time. Transience and decay amid the appearance of copious life is announced by the brown-edged grape leaves--especially the heart-shaped leaf, which has been eaten away by insects, at the picture’s very pinnacle.

Clearly the bacchanal is not without its headaches of responsibility. But just as clearly, Roesen subordinates them to an ecstatic wallow in luxury.

After all, this still-life does not represent a genteel dessert to be pleasurably lingered over with satisfaction and gratitude after a meal. Instead, it’s a virtual plantation harvest festival, a lavish wedding banquet and a bar mitzvah celebration rolled into one, all designed to use nature’s bounty to show off extraordinary good fortune to the multitudes.

As a decorative and pricey object, the big painting also has cultural showiness as part of its goal. Two hundred years after the heyday of 17th century Dutch still-life painting, the inclusion of standard Dutch motifs in a mid-19th century American picture is as much a display of skillful artistry and cultural erudition as it is a cautionary warning against the vanity of life.

Roesen’s handsome picture isn’t as beautifully painted as Peale’s. Together, however, they demonstrate a lot about the range of American art and sensibility in the 19th century. Multiply that by a few dozen other wonderful paintings, and you’ve got a show worth lingering over.

Like a similar survey of French art mounted at LACMA in 1991, the exhibition offers a welcome opportunity to see privately owned paintings that aren’t often publicly accessible--although it’s also plain that mounting a show like this is a not-so-subtle hint that the museum would be more than happy to have them in its own collection. (One of them already is: Martin Johnson Heade’s wonderfully astringent landscape with a grain stack, “Rhode Island Shore” of 1858, a recent bequest of Charles and Elma Ralphs Shoemaker.) Unlike its French predecessor, however, which was so filled with mediocrity as to require high boots to wade to the occasional gems, this group of paintings is abundant in its pleasures.

Certainly there is dross. American painters, especially in the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, were often wildly enamored of anecdotal pictures that made painting the equivalent of a kind of pompous illustration for a McGuffey’s Reader.

The show sags in the middle, where a healthy supply of arid history painting, cowboy-and-Indian melodramas and pseudo-documentaries of supposed Oriental exoticism in the mysterious East are on hand. They’re of more interest as social records of their era than as artistic achievements.

Yet the show is bracketed by substantial rooms featuring paintings of unusual interest. Some are terrific examples by major painters; others are oddities, those quirky and wholly unexpected pictures that give a collection its liveliness and character.

If I had to choose the major works in the show, I’d pick five: the Peale; the Heade; William Michael Harnett’s exceptionally clever painting of a letter rack, “Mr. Huling’s Rack Picture” (1888); George Inness’ blazingly poetic--and startlingly abstract--landscape with figures, “Sunset, Milking Time, Montclair” (1889); and Helen Lundeberg’s “Plant and Animal Analogies” (1934-36), which ranks as a virtual manifesto of her personally inflected, classically ordered Surrealist art.

In addition, the show claims more than two dozen other standouts, on a par with Roesen’s still-life extravaganza. In addition to a host of well-known artists--Gilbert Stuart, Asher B. Durand, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, Reginald Marsh, Stanton McDonald Wright, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe and Raphaelle Peale’s uncle, James--painters more familiar to specialists will also be found. They’re worth searching out.

A fine Italianate landscape by the first great African American artist, Robert Duncanson, is on view. The shimmering, strangely charged fortress walls of Henry O. Tanner’s little “Midday Tangiers” (circa 1915) blows away everything else in its gallery. If you like Southern California plein-air painting, there are very good examples by Granville Redmond, William Wendt and Edgar Alwyn Payne.

“Chess and Politics” (circa 1933-39) gets a subtle sexual charge in Jared French’s hands, as does Henrietta Shore’s dryly painted, wildly hermaphroditic “Cactus” (1926). Modern abstraction gets a crisp nod in John Ferren’s Leger-like picture and Harry Holtzman’s Mondrian-like one, both from the late 1930s.

LACMA curator Ilene Susan Fort has installed this wide range of paintings in a loose chronology, grouping works according to such familiar period themes as “The New Eden,” “Painting the Real” and “Early Modernism and Abstraction.” The installation mimics the standard historical displays common to permanent museum collections. While the resulting temporary show is already more compelling than the permanent holdings of any number of small museums, its home in a major institution also has the unfortunate effect of highlighting what is missing--a more substantial representation of works by women, for example, or a great Arthur Dove abstraction.

Private collections in Southern California evidently don’t possess a full sweep of American painting from the beginning to World War II. (Fifty-six different collections are represented in the show.) Nonetheless, the generally high level of quality overall demonstrates that American paintings are an especially prized commodity hereabouts.

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“AMERICAN PAINTINGS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COLLECTIONS: FROM GILBERT STUART TO GEORGIA O’KEEFFE,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Tuesday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Through May 26. Prices: $1-$6; children 5 and under, free. Phone: (213) 857-6000.