Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso - Home

Transcription

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Death’s Head, , oil on canvas,  x  cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Bodegones
A
lthough the still-life genre was the last in the painting of the Spanish School to
be discovered and appreciated, there are two facts that should at least be taken
into consideration. The first is the very singularity of the word that designates the genre
in Spanish, bodegón, and the remarkably early date at which its usage became current.
If we look at other countries for the sake of comparison, it is apparent that most did
not create a specific term of their own until the mid-seventeenth century. In the case of
France, indeed, the term used in the seventeenth century, vie coite, was later changed to
the current nature morte. Like the French term, the English “still life” and the German
Stillleben are both late, and all in any case share the same meaning of life that is motionless or immobilized. By contrast, in Spain we find the term pintura de bodegón as early
as , when it is used to describe some pictures in the estate of Pantoja de la Cruz, so
demonstrating it was already then in popular use. It certainly must have been to be
included in Sebastián de Covarrubias’s dictionary of , which lists both bodegón and
bodegonero. The first was applied to a “basement or lower hallway that contains the
bodega,” previously defined by Covarrubias as the cellar where the wine was kept,
“where he who has no one to cook his food will find it ready prepared, and its drink
next to it, for which reason such a meal was called de bodega.” A bodegonero, in the
meantime, is described as follows: “They are those who have a bodegón, who are ordinarily dirty and greasy from their business, and generally fat and flabby owing to the
dissolute life they lead, and to whom we compare men whose girth appears to be like
theirs.” Although Covarrubias makes no specific mention of the use of these terms in
painting, we cannot ignore the fact that he associates the word bodegón with what we
would call a pantry or larder, which is rather more than simply a place to store food,
and that his bodegonero fits perfectly with a number of painted kitchen scenes, such as

the one from around ‒ attributed to Alejandro de Loarte in the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam. On the other hand, it is also true that Spanish writers on art in the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries—until Francisco Pacheco, at least—were
reluctant to use the term, but this seems to have been because of a doctrinaire prejudice against the development of Caravaggesque naturalism rather than because the
word did not form part of their colloquial speech.
Francisco de Guevara mentions the “painting of grasses” in his Comentarios de la
pintura of , explaining its ancient precursors and modern development. In the
Noticia General para la estimación de las artes () by Gaspar Gutiérrez de los Ríos,
it is affirmed that painters should know how to imitate “all kinds of terrestrial, celestial, and maritime animals,” as well as “grasses, plants, and stones.” There are also references to the genre in Pablo de Céspedes’s Discurso de la comparación de la antigua y
moderna pintura () and Brother José de Siguenza’s description of the monastery
of El Escorial (). It is not, however, until we come to Vicente Carducho that the
genre is set against its full background of controversy, occasioned by none other than
resistance to the spread of naturalist painting in the Caravaggesque style. This had
been introduced to Spain mainly through Seville, the city from which Velázquez
came. His triumphant appearance at court in the s was greeted with considerable
suspicion by his displaced colleagues, Carducho among them. In his Diálogos de la
pintura (), Carducho warns against naturalism, but not only in response to the
professional worries that the young Velázquez might have caused him, but also
because the new trends did not square with his strict doctrine, by then already narrow, which was inspired by late Mannerism rather than the classicist revival that took
place in Rome in the s. What is pertinent to our concerns, however, is that
Carducho refers in his treatise to the bodegón, though he does not call it by this name.
He claims that at the age of sixteen, he himself was skilled at painting “an ordinary
candle,” and that at the time of writing, there were specialists whose trompe-l’oeil
paintings caused a sensation, “so well can the artificer imitate the natural.” Next,
Carducho comments on the spread of this fashion and its dangers, placing the words
in the mouth of the pupil he is holding his dialogue with: “And I have seen works of
that kind which have been greatly applauded and rewarded by powerful men, by
Republics and Magistrates—I cannot tell which the most. And I do not know what
judgment or resolution to follow when I look upon the feigned taffeta that appears

Juan de Valdés Leal, In Ictu Oculi, ca. ‒, oil on canvas,    cm, Hospital de la Caridad, Seville
to be real taffeta, the cloth, the drape, the jug, the knife, the bench, the bread, the
fruit, the fowl, the brute animal and the rational, and all the rest done with great propriety, without such an effort of the spirit and without so much drawing or studying
(as you have proposed), yet achieving the same ends of praise and esteem as the others, and no less of a desire among many that the degree of learned Painting be
bestowed upon that faithful imitator of Nature.”
One who did use the term bodegón, and who came out in its defense as well as the portrait’s, was Pacheco, for not in vain was it in these specialties that his son-in-law Velázquez
had initially distinguished himself. The reference comes in Pacheco’s Arte de la pintura,
whose publication was delayed until , but which we know him to have been working on for at least twenty years. What he has to say on the subject is priceless: “What,
then? Should bodegones not be held in esteem? Of course they should, if they are painted
as my son-in-law paints them, triumphing so far in the genre as to leave room for no
other. And they merit enormous esteem, for with these beginnings and his portraits, of

which we shall speak later, he found the true imitation of the natural, inspiring the souls
of many with his mighty example. I once tried my hand at it when in Madrid, in the
year , and I painted him a little canvas with two figures taken from nature, flowers
and fruits and other toys, which is now in the possession of my learned friend Francisco de Rioja; and I succeeded in making the other things I had at hand seem to appear
before him. When the figures have boldness, draftsmanship, and color, and seem alive,
and are the same as the other things taken from nature that are brought together in these
paintings we have been mentioning, they reap great honor for the artificer.”
We might go on to cite other Spanish writings on art from the remainder of the seventeenth century, but there is little need to because nearly all of them follow the polemical tone outlined earlier. What is
clear, at any rate, is that regardless of
the doctrine followed by each particular author, nearly all of whom were
also painters, the reason for their
suspicion of the bodegón, and indeed
of all genres other than the historic,
was—with rare exceptions—their
fear of social contempt for the image
of the artist. This was a perpetual
concern in Spain, where various
pleas in defense of liberality in painting were made in the course of the
century, largely in response to the
country’s archaic structures, which
devalued any person or function that
was not demonstrably noble.
Apart from these observations on
the history and doctrine of the
genre in seventeenth-century Spain,
what is beyond all question is the
importance and, above all, the

Pablo Picasso, Trussed Cock, , oil on canvas,  x  cm, Collection of Bernard Ruiz Picasso,
courtesy Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte
Francisco de Goya, Plucked Turkey, ca. ‒, oil on canvas, .  . cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Purchase, 
personality of the bodegón. The first still lifes of Caravaggio are nearly simultaneous
with those painted in Spain by Sánchez Cotán, whose work, together with that of his
immediate followers, was unique by comparison with other models from abroad.
This judgment is upheld by one of the most prestigious art historians in Spain
today, Alfonso Pérez Sánchez, a seventeenth-century specialist who was moreover one
of the first to draw attention to the Spanish bodegón, until then somewhat overlooked. “Without doubt,” he writes, “the Spanish still life . . . has a quite singular
personality, and responds to a concept that differs to some extent from its contemporaries in Italy, Flanders, Holland, and France. A humble, grave, and profound sensibility impregnated with an almost religious sentiment, which imposes order on
objects of transcendent value, becomes the new and highly personal contribution of
the first Spanish artists in the genre. On occasion, it seems to have a quasi-religious
character, which perhaps often escapes us today, unfamiliar as we are with the language of the mystics and the immediate everyday metaphors of the ascetic writers like
Brother Luis of Granada, Saint Teresa, or John of Avila. It is surely no coincidence
that some series of Spanish still lifes come from closed convents and are still found

today in cathedral sacristies, and that their most masterly creator, Juan Sánchez
Cotán, was a Carthusian friar.”
While Pérez Sánchez clearly points to the religiosity underlying the bodegones, he is
more skeptical about the many symbolic interpretations they have given rise to. An
exception is the vanitas, which became common in Spain in the second half of the seventeenth century, and whose evidently moralizing purpose was to emphasize on the
one hand the unreliability of sensual pleasure, and on the other the fatality of death,
evidenced in the corruptibility of organic nature. Pérez Sánchez certainly seems to be
right in finding these iconographic interpretations of the classic Spanish bodegón to be
random as well as historically unfounded. The arguments are either very generic, or
they lack the support of contemporary literature and documentation to accredit them.
It is nevertheless true that on some occasions, one example being Sánchez Cotán’s
early bodegones, it is very tempting to speculate about the geometrical precision
with which objects are delineated, sometimes with a composition that appears to
respond to a golden section, while humble vegetables are outlined with a crystalline
gleam against a disquieting half-light. This is a matter that merits careful revision,
since it may well be that new critical access points will be discovered and supported
by proper cultural research. In any case, the Spanish bodegón emerges with a clear personality of its own, which comes from the fact that it consistently reflects a particular
sensibility, some of whose characteristics coincide marvelously with that expressed by
contemporary Spanish writers, and not only those of a devotional nature.
As I had occasion to write in the catalogue of the exhibition El Bodegón español de
Zurbarán a Picasso (Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes, ), when the formal definition
of the Spanish bodegón reached its high point, which must have been around the first
third of the seventeenth century, it had very little in common with the sumptuous
spreads of the kitchen tables of Flanders, or with the expressive burlesque of the figures
appearing in Italian pictures, or with the refinement of the flower and fruit compositions of Italy’s first still lifes. Flemish and Italian influence was obviously a determinant
at first, and in one way or another continued to affect Spanish painting throughout the
seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the minutely constructed network of incitations,
borrowings, and suggestions is broken with the emergence of Sánchez Cotán, who
clearly defines the Spanish taste in the genre for the first time.

Juan Sánchez Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, ca. , oil on canvas, . x . cm, San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of
Misses Anne R. and Amy Putnam
The strange framework within which Sánchez Cotán constructs his bodegones may
well have corresponded to the typical pantry closet of those times, which would have
served him well for the creation of the illusionistic perspective effect that became so
highly regarded as the genre evolved, but it generates, even so, a special and very magnetic atmosphere of density and depth. This is what enables sensations of spatial timelessness to intersect with the contradictory impressions of temporal brevity aroused by
the objects inhabiting this space, whose precise and minutely described materiality
seems to transform them into dramatic reminders of the transience of beauty or the
notion of perishability. In any case, this intersection or conflict between the atmosphere of a space that remains immutable and the illuminated drama of its changeable
and corruptible occupants reveals a highly characteristic sensitivity and concept of the
world. On the other hand, the extremely careful arrangement of this handful of
objects in the foreground, where they are distributed along a painstakingly drawn arc,

has led some commentators to assume that Sánchez Cotán composed them on the
basis of some mathematical ratio. This, we are told, was a way of dignifying the genre,
which could demonstrate in this way that it was not done “on the off chance,” as one
scornful accusation of the time held, but was the result of careful study and the application of the most complex scientific laws of proportion, order, and perspective. It surprises me, however, that Sánchez Cotán’s evident preoccupation with “ordering” the
picture has not been associated with Juan de Herrera’s sixteenth-century Discurso de la
figura cúbica, and in general with the spirit infusing the construction of the monastery
of El Escorial, a monument in which geometry acts with such a powerful effect of
timelessness. What interests me about this relationship, though, is not merely that it
provides one more explanation for the network of Counter-Reformation influences in
the bodegones of Sánchez Cotán, but that the aesthetic influence of Herrera’s building
was highly significant for later Spanish art. There has been talk in this respect of a
“mineral” constant in Spanish artistic taste, providing a dialectical contrast over the
centuries with the more universally recognized expressive constant of Spain’s historic
art. In this way, Herrera, Sánchez Cotán, and Zurbarán were eventually to reach across
time to Cubism, an avant-garde style that has been described as having Spanish roots,
especially where the style and personality of Juan Gris are concerned. From this perspective, the bodegones of Sánchez Cotán, with their mixture of geometry and expressiveness, space and time, and idealization and naturalism, eventually came to constitute an inescapable historical model.
The immediate impact of Sánchez Cotán’s bodegones was certainly formidable, but we
are less interested here in listing his hordes of followers—Felipe Ramírez, the early Van
der Hamen, Alejandro Loarte, Juan Fernández el Labrador, and both Zurbarán and his
son Juan—than in the extent of the imprint fashioned from his mold, which successfully fed into both of the historic trends of the Spanish still life. The first of these is the
more conceptual, crystalline, and—if the term will indeed be permitted—“mineral”
tendency, while confronting it is a more organic and expressive approach. Following the
distinction we have used here to subdivide the history of the genre in Spain, still-life
painting can thereby be said to bear the mark of either mortality or immortality, though
we are well aware that such a division is not always clear-cut, and certainly was not at
the time. However, leaving aside the fact that the Spanish bodegón of the second half of
the seventeenth century was rendered more sumptuous, theatrical, expressive, and

sensual by a clear Flemish influence, we find in the eighteenth century that Luis
Meléndez is counterposed in this way with Francisco de Goya, and that the contrast is
repeated again in the early twentieth century with Gris and Pablo Picasso.
The essential relationship of Cubism to the still life is so obvious that it is unnecessary
to dwell on it here. The only thing worth pointing out is the aesthetic polarization that
caused Picasso and Gris to diverge in their treatments of Cubism and the still life. As
he had sporadically done earlier, Gris returned to the geometrical and mineralized line
that started with Sánchez Cotán and Zurbarán, while Picasso remained more faithful
to the expressive line. This calls to mind some words by the Spanish writer Ramón
Gómez de la Serna: “In Cubism, the bottle and its glass shut artists up inside the lunatic
asylum of the vitreous: an anguished mystery in which matter wants to be something
other than what it can be.” The quotation is taken from a section of his book Ismos
(Isms), whose title, significantly, is “Botellismo” (Bottlism). The striking thing about
this, I find, is not only that it seems a perfect illustration of what Jean Cocteau recorded Gris as once saying to him—“J’ai introduit le siphon dans la peinture”—but that it
unexpectedly relates this vitreous lunacy to the local Castilian tradition of a painterly
obsession with making still lifes of bottles, rather as another emphatically Spanish
painter, José Gutiérrez Solana, later continued to do.
One could keep adding to the list of twentieth-century Spanish artists in whom the
same distinction is to be observed. The Surrealists Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí both
frequented genres like the still life and the landscape, but it is perhaps more relevant to
point out that the Surrealist still life, which followed after the crystallization of the
Cubist bodegón, was expressionistic and organic in nature. Surging up once more in this
way are the two constants, the mineral and the organic, which lit the way for the aesthetic tradition of the Spanish bodegón, producing a strange and prodigious dialectic
between the living and the dead. F. C. S.

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
J UA N S Á N C H E Z C O T Á N (1560–1627)
Still Life with Fruits and Vegetables, ca. 1602
Oil on canvas, 69.5 x 96.5 cm
Várez Fisa Collection, Madrid
PROVENANCE:
Adanero Collection, Madrid; Viscount of Roda, Madrid; Banco de Inversión Collection,
Madrid.
SELECTED REFERENCES:
Lafuente Ferrari , no. , n. ; Angulo-Pérez Sánchez , p. , no. ;
Seville , no. ; Young , pp. –; Gudiol , pp. –; Münster-Baden-Baden ,
pp. –, no. ; Madrid A, p. ; Fort Worth , no. ; Madrid C, pp. –, no. ; Cherry
, p. , no. X; Scheffler , pp. –, ,  no. .
Lafuente Ferrari was one of the first scholars to remark upon the artistic quality of Sánchez Cotán’s Still Life with
Fruits and Vegetables, with its series of carefully studied fruits and vegetables arranged rhythmically within a horizontal canvas. The objects hanging from the window frame form a descending diagonal between the upper-left
corner of the painting and its lower right section. The composition should be read from the two lemons, one of
which is whole and the other cut in half. The compositional diagonal decreases with the long and heavy citron
and the large cabbage, whose pale leaves and stems create a tangled bundle at the center of this peculiar hanging
frieze. At the end of this unusual “enfilade” of vegetables is a bunch of carrots whose tips protrude slightly past
the area demarcated by the window frame. A cardoon occupies a second row, resting on the window ledge. Its
treatment is smooth and transparent, revealing the geometry of the window structure beneath it. This detail
points to the stages in which the artist typically worked on a canvas. In this case, it is clear that he painted the
window structure before setting the fruits and vegetables within the architectural frame. Like the carrots, the
cardoon extends beyond the plane of the window ledge. The vegetables penetrate the viewer’s pictorial space, as
do the orange slice and the escarole. An orange in the far right corner of the composition marks the end of the
pictorial narrative.
Pérez Sánchez situates the work of Sánchez Cotán in the context of the artistic innovations of Lombard naturalism, whose examples may shed light on the origin of this new genre of Baroque painting. The still lifes by
Sánchez Cotán, however, were completed before the artist had any knowledge of the work of Caravaggio, whose
style was formed around . As noted by Scheffler, the compositional formula by which a window ledge or
frame serves as an architectural setting for fruits, vegetables, or dead animals, originates in the mosaics and paintings of Roman antiquity. It is possible that Blas de Prado studied and copied some of these works during his travels, and later transmitted their compositional type to his friend Sánchez Cotán.

A. R.
See Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Caravaggio y el naturalismo español, exh. cat. (Seville: Reales Alcázares, ), pp. ‒.

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
J UA N S Á N C H E Z C O T Á N (1560–1627)
Still Life with Cardoon and Parsnips, ca. 1604
Oil on canvas, 63 x 85 cm
Museo de Bellas Artes, Granada
PROVENANCE:
Charterhouse of Santa María de la Asunción, Granada, until ; Museo Provincial de Bellas
Artes de la Alhambra, Granada, .
Lafuente Ferrari , p. ; Orozco B, pp. , ; Angulo-Pérez Sánchez
, pp. ‒, , no. ; Denny ; Young , pp. ‒; Münster-Baden-Baden , pp. ‒,
no. ; Madrid A, no. ; Fort Worth , no. ; Jordan , p. ; Ayala Mallory , pp. ‒;
Madrid C, pp. ‒, no. ; Orozco , p. ; London , pp. -; Bilbao , no. ; Cherry ,
p. ; Scheffler , pp. ‒, , fig. .
Still Life with Cardoon and Parsnips is generally considered the last still life completed by Sánchez Cotán before
his admission to the Carthusian monastery in Granada. Eric Young, however, insists that the painter must have
brought it along from Toledo in . This canvas marks the culmination of Sánchez Cotán’s artistic evolution
toward an extreme simplicity, akin to Still Life with Cardoon and Francolin (ca. , private collection, Seattle).
The rose-colored cardoon, which is the protagonist of both compositions, is shown resting on the right side of a
window sill. Sánchez Cotán also includes in this composition four parsnips on the window frame, a detail that
allows the painter to articulate the quality of perspective in the pictorial space. The painter has eliminated other
objects, such as fruits or flowers, which were common in his previous works. The entire focus of the composition
falls now on these humble vegetables, which are bathed in a subtle and warm light. The way the composition is
illuminated creates an intense shadow on the left corner of the window, highlighting the vegetables before a dark
background.
The predominance of the void and the focus on essential elements have encouraged critics to ascribe a symbolic meaning to Sánchez Cotán’s still lifes. Don Denny has seen the cardoon as a representation of the whip
of flagellation and the parsnips as the four nails of the Passion of Christ. Diego Angulo Iñíguez and Alfonso E.
Pérez Sánchez stress the realistic quality of Sánchez Cotán’s still lifes, whose aspiration is only
to represent nature, while William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry maintain that the vegetables are an allusion to
the vegetarian regime of the Carthusian order and classify the canvas within a type of still life known as
“Lent still life.”
A. R.

Eric Young, “New Perspectives on Spanish Still-Life Painting in the Golden Age,” The Burlington Magazine,  (),
pp. ‒.

Don Denny, “Sánchez Cotán, Still life with Carrots and Cardoon,” Pantheon  (), pp. ‒.

Diego Angulo Iñíguez and Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Historia de la pintura española: Escuela toledana de la primera
mitad del siglo XVII (Madrid: CSIC, ), pp. ‒.

William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry, Spanish Still Life from Velázquez to Goya, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery,
), p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
J UA N VA N D E R H A M E N (1596–1631)
The Serving Table, early 1620s
Signed upper right: Ju Vanderhamen / de leon, factore
Private collection, Düsseldorf
PROVENANCE:
Adolfo de Arenaza, Madrid, during the s; Pietro Lorenzelli, Bergamo
Jordan 1964–65, p. 61; Jordan 1967, p. 327, no. 4; Triadó 1975, p. 39, no. 1; London
1995, pp. 47–49; Cherry 1999, pp. 151–52; Madrid-Dallas 2005, pp. 114–18, no. 16.
This is one of the largest works by Van der Hamen; it was published in the mid-1960s by William B. Jordan and
is excellently preserved. The painting belongs to the type of still life known as “set tables,” which are based
on Flemish and Dutch still lifes and were the subject of Van der Hamen’s work throughout his career. While
Flemish and Dutch painters sought to display an abundance of foods and luxurious objects in disarray in their
“set tables,” Van der Hamen chose a compositional clarity whose rigor is almost architectural. The painter presents a table covered in a fine Damascus cloth whose creases form a reticular network of lines. On it are two rows
of plates and containers. In the foreground are three plates from Talavera full of peaches, figs, and clusters of
grapes. Within Van der Hamen’s studied distribution of objects can be found a round loaf of bread and a knife
that protrude past the edge of the table in an illusionistic manner. In the second row are several containers, such
as a bottle (whose stopper is in the foreground, left) and a plate with a golden-silver base. In the center of this
second row of objects are a spice holder, a Venetian glass, and on the far right end of the table, a decanter with a
long neck, full of wine. Based on its formal characteristics, Jordan dates this painting to the early s. He compares it, for example, to the two canvases by the painter kept at the Museo Nacional del Prado: Basket, Boxes and
Jars with Sweets and Still Life with Sweets and Glass Containers, both from . The works are comparable in their
vigorous modeling of objects and the intense contrast of light and shadow depicted by Van der Hamen. There is
a second version of the The Serving Table that is doubtlessly also an autograph work and is dated around .
Another important example of a “set table” still life within Spanish painting is the elegant Still-life with
Silver Gilt Salvers completed in  by Juan Bautista de Espinosa (Masaveu Collection, Oviedo).

William B. Jordan, “Juan van der Hamen y León: A Madrilenian Still-Life Painter,” Marsyas 12 (‒), pp. ‒.

William B. Jordan, Juan van der Hamen y León and the Court of Madrid, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, ), p. .

Ibid., p. .

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
Still Life with Sweets, 1621
Oil on canvas, 37.5 x 49 cm
Signed and dated lower right: Juan Banderamen / fat, 1621
Museo de Bellas Artes, Granada
PROVENANCE:
Probably in the inventory of Buen Retiro Palace, ; Archbishop’s Palace, La Zubia
(Granada); acquired by the city government of Granada, 1946; deposited in the Museo Provincial de Bellas
Artes, Granada, 1958.
Cavestany ‒, p. ; Orozco , p. ; Jordan , pp. ‒, no. ;
Triadó , p. , no. ; Münster-Baden-Baden , no. ; Madrid A, pp. ‒, no. ; London ,
p. ; Scheffler , pp. ‒, fig. ; Madrid-Dallas , no. .
Still Life with Sweets is one of Van der Hamen’s earliest works and represents a prototypical composition, one to
which he often returned for answers and formal solutions in subsequent canvases, as well as for specific objects.
Van der Hamen evidently knew the work of Sánchez Cotán, but chose to depict more sumptuous utensils and
foods than his contemporary; the exquisite sweets and luxurious silver or glass objects seen here reflect the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the court society that he frequented. But the main difference between the still lifes of
these artists lies in the fact that Van der Hamen tended to represent foods that had been manipulated or preserved, while Sánchez Cotán preferred to show them in their natural state, as they grew or were hunted.
Like Sánchez Cotán, however, Van der Hamen lines up his objects on a narrow stone ledge. In order to heighten the spatial illusion in the foreground he also makes the larger wooden box and the silver spoon appear to project from the ledge, using a trompe-l’oeil effect. With this gesture Van der Hamen brings the spoon closer to the
viewer so that he might almost sample the tempting sweets. The piled little boxes contain marzipan or quince
jam; the glass jar that crowns this small ensemble reveals a sour-cherry jam. On the right, slightly removed from
the foreground, Van der Hamen places the clay honey jar or mielero. The painter closes the composition toward
the back with dense shadow, isolating and monumentalizing the objects in the manner of Sánchez Cotán. But he
describes the different surfaces and textures of his objects with the technical precision and minuteness characteristic of the Flemish tradition of painting. To this end, Van der Hamen carefully illuminates the objects from the
left. Light crashes with touches of white against the hard and transparent glass and reveals with a satin gleam the
streaked surface of the wooden boxes, where a few black metal nails are clearly identifiable. The relief decoration
on the handle and edge of the silver spoon reflects the light intensely. This in turn projects a shadow on to the
ledge, establishing visual space within the composition.
A. R.

Felix Scheffler, Das spanische Stilleben des . Jahrhunderts.Theorie, Genese und Entfaltung einer Bildgattung (Frankfurt
am Main: Vervuert, ), p. .

Ibid., p. , for the possible symbolic meaning of these boxes (scrinium deitatis).

Ibid., p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
Still Life with Sweets, 1622
Signed and dated lower left: Juo Vander Gamen / de Leon fat, 1622
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Mexico City; sale, Christie’s New York, January , ; Newhouse
Galleries (with Eugene V. Thaw), New York, 1979–80; acquired by the Cleveland Museum, 1980.
Madrid-Dallas , no. .
Only a year after the completion of Still Life with Sweets (), Van der Hamen signed and dated a more sophisticated image in which he included exotic green Venetian glass objects with gilt-bronze mounts. Decorative glass
pieces like the ones seen here were symbols of prestige as well as functional objects, and they were often put on
display in wealthy homes. Here he assembles the items on the same plane, creating a frieze-like line on a narrow
ledge; and bases his composition on cubic and elongated pieces arranged diagonally or in parallel lines toward the
foreground. On a rectangular wooden box the painter sets a footed green-glass dish that holds a square piece of
pine-nut nougat and two turrones, sweets made from a mixture of honey. This exquisite ensemble of sweets is
flanked by a long Venetian glass receptacle that probably contains liquor, a suitable accompaniment for sweets.
On the left of the canvas is another dish of turrones and pine-nut nougat and, in the center of the composition,
a half-empty bottle. Finally, at the edge of the table, the artist places several nuts in their shells, split in half, and
a piece of a nut kernel. As in the painting from , Van der Hamen lights this composition with a single beam
directed from the left. It creates brilliantly calculated half-shadows between the objects.
The composition, lighting, and the disposition of the various objects in this painting owe much to the work
of Sánchez Cotán. However, as recent scholarship suggests, the artist’s luxurious decorative pieces were probably
inspired by ancient Roman sources. Van der Hamen might have encountered such objects through the famous
antique dealer and collector, Cassiano dal Pozzo, who accompanied Cardinal Francesco Barberini (also portrayed
by Van der Hamen) to the Spanish court; or through the erudite architect, designer, and still-life painter
Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, who arrived in Spain in  with his protégé, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi.

On the role of glass in the work of Juan van der Hamen, see Peter Cherry, Arte y Naturaleza. El bodegón Español en el
Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Fundación de Apoyo a la Historia del Arte Hispánico, ), pp. ‒.

The turrone, one of Spain’s most traditional sweets, is Arabic in origin. Its chief ingredients are nuts (especially
almonds, hazelnuts, and pine nuts), honey, and sugar.

Felix Scheffler, Das spanische Stilleben des . Jahrhunderts. Theorie, Genese und Entfaltung einer Bildgattung (Frankfurt
am Main: Vervuert, ), pp. ‒.

On that encounter, see Cherry, Arte y Naturaleza, pp. , , n. .

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
A N T O N I O D E P E R E D A (1611–1678)
Still Life with Walnuts, 1634
Oil on panel, 20.7 cm in diameter
Signed and dated lower right: AP / 
Private collection
PROVENANCE:
unknown.
Angulo-Pérez Sánchez , p. , no. , fig. ; Madrid A, p. , no. ;
Fort Worth , no. ; London , p. , no. ; Bilbao , pp. –, no. .
Still Life with Walnuts is the earliest still life both signed and dated by Antonio de Pereda. At the age of twentythree, the young artist demonstrated his extraordinary ability as a still-life painter by turning a group of humble
nuts into the protagonists of this small panel. As if seeing them through a magnifying glass, Pereda enlarges the
six walnuts resting on a ledge and sets them in a round canvas. He represents the walnuts with an almost scientific degree of attention to detail, showing them in a variety of conditions: in their shells, divided precisely in two,
partially freed from their shells, and, finally, fully shelled. The composition is brightly illuminated from the left,
creating a strong chiaroscuro that enhances the subjects of the painting. The nuanced light is reflected on the surface of the velvety shells, gradually becoming brighter where it brushes the scales and fibers of the tender fruit,
whose structure resembles that of the brain. This work is an exceptional example of Pereda’s skill in the representation of natural forms, one admired by his first mentor, the Marquis de la Torre, and shared by Giovanni
Battista Crescendi, a patron of the young Pereda and himself a painter of still lifes. According to Lázaro Díaz del
Valle, Pereda executed this still life around the same time as The Allegory of Vanity (, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna). The maturity and technical dexterity of the young painter can be demonstrated by comparing Still Life with Walnuts to a late work by the artist like Still Life with Shells and Clock (, Pushkin Museum
of Fine Arts, Moscow), which shows walnuts represented with a similar degree of precision.

A. R.
Lázaro Díaz del Valle, “Epílogo y nomenclatura de algunos artifices, Manuscrite entre ‒,” manuscript partially
published by Francisco Sánchez Cantón, Fuentas literarias para la Historia del Arte Español (Madrid, ), vol. ,
pp. ‒.

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
A N T O N I O D E P E R E D A (1611–1678)
Vanitas, ca. 1640–50
Museo de Zaragoza
PROVENANCE:
Luis Betegón de la Portilla, until .
Beltrán Martínez , p. , no. ; Gállego , p. ; Madrid –,
no. ; Madrid , pp. –, no. ; Angulo-Pérez Sánchez , pp. –, no. , fig. ; Madrid
A, p. , no. ; Fort Worth , no. ; London , p. ; Bilbao , pp. –, no. .
The technical quality and powerful theme of this painting gives it a compelling presence in spite of its relatively
small size. In the extreme foreground, a pocket watch and a skull rest on a table. Two further skulls lie behind it.
Pereda demonstrates here his mastery of the still life, showing the skulls in different positions and illuminated to
different degrees, and deploying audacious foreshortening techniques to detail the bone structure of the human
cranium. The painter’s minute brushwork responds to a careful and precise underdrawing of the concavities and
fissures of the skulls, which are seen from below, from above, and in profile. The result is a sophisticated lesson
on the extremely complex configuration of craniums, a frequent motif in Pereda’s work of the s. This small
canvas, however, goes beyond mere technical tour de force; it is a shocking memento mori of the ultimate victory of death, which has finally triumphed over the inanity of human existence and mundane pleasures. This
motif had already appeared in the painter’s large Vienna canvas (The Allegory of Vanity, , Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna). Vanitas exhibits what remains of human beings after the body’s demise: three solid skulls, traditional symbols of the expiration of existence, and the watch. Pereda may have based these skulls on a series of
etchings by Barthel Beham. Here they serve, nonetheless, as essential symbols of the Baroque understanding of
the concept of vanitas, a response to the contemporary taste for allegories of the transience of life perhaps best
represented in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s great play La vida es sueño ().
A. R.

Pérez Sánchez observes the similarity between the skull in the center of this painting and the central one in Pereda’s
canvases portraying the Infant Christ Triumphant over Death (ca. ) in the Church of Arc-Senans, France, as well as
the similar composition of the same subject in the Church of Las Maravillas in Madrid, dated ca. . Skulls identical
to those in the Museo de Zaragoza canvas appear in all the variations made by Pereda on the theme of vanitas. It is also
an indispensable detail in his works showing such penitent saints as The Penitent Magdalene (, Pushkin Museum of
Fine Arts, Moscow) or Saint Jerome (, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).

Matías Díaz Padrón in El arte en la época de Calderón, exh. cat. (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, ), pp. ‒.
Diego Angulo Iñiguez and Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez suspect, however, that the canvas is a fragment from a different
composition. Conservation has revealed the existence of repainted areas, which obscured the background and emphasized
the foreground of the image. Angulo Iñiguez and Pérez Sánchez, Pintura madrileña del Segundo tercio del siglo XVII
(Madrid: CSIC, ), p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
F R A N C I S C O D E Z U R B A R Á N (1598–1664)
Agnus Dei, ca. 1636–40
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
PROVENANCE:
Marqueses del Socorro, until ; acquired by the Spanish government for the Museo
Nacional del Prado, .
Angulo , pp. ‒; Soria , no. ; Guinard , no. ; Gállego-Gudiol
, no. ; Madrid A, no. ; Valdivieso B, no. ; Caturla , p. ; Aparicio-Pizarro ,
pp. ‒; Seville , no. ; Bilbao , no. ; Díaz Padrón .
There are several known versions of Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei. Some depict rams with large horns, such as this example at the Museo Nacional del Prado; some show lambs, like that of the San Diego Museum of Art, which is—
after the version at the Prado—one of the most outstanding examples. The animal in the painting exhibited here
has been abandoned on a tabletop, its four legs tied, ready for its imminent sacrifice. The accuracy of Zurbarán’s
details—the ram’s delicate eyelashes, the tactile quality of its tight whitish woolen coat, or its small hard horns—
make this appear as a painting from life. Despite its naturalism, the image has devotional significance, and this
can be seen clearly in the San Diego version, which shows a lamb with a bright halo and the inscription, quoted
from Isaiah, “tanquam agnus” (“as a lamb”)—in Christian liturgical language, the lamb represents the “Lamb of
God,” written in Latin as “agnus dei.” Although the canvas at the Prado depicts a ram, scholars believe that its
meaning is devotional as well.
Since antiquity, the lamb has been an emblem of innocence and obedience and thus an ideal victim for religious sacrifice. In Christian art it is, furthermore, a common symbol of the figure of Christ. Its whiteness incarnates the triumph of purity and its blood that of Christ spilt on the Cross. Peter ( Peter, ‒) and Paul
( Corinthians, :) compare the death of Christ with that of the young lamb. In the Gospel according to John,
John the Baptist mentions the “lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world,” whose sacrifice will mean
the triumph of life over death. The Passion of Christ is described in the Acts of the Apostles (:) through
Isaiah’s prophecy (:‒): “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; And as a lamb before his shearer is dumb, So
he opens not his mouth.” For Zurbarán it is the ideal theme of small devotional paintings, in which he could
exhibit his forte: technical accuracy and a rich range of nuances within a reduced palette.
A. R.

For the remaining versions, kept in various private collections in Madrid and Barcelona, see Julián Gállego and José
Gudiol, Zurbarán ‒ (New York: Rizzoli, ), nos. , , and ; and Matías Díaz Padrón, “Una quinta
repetición inédita del Agnus Dei de Zurbarán,” Goya ‒ (), pp. ‒.

Confirmed also by Javier Portús, in Francisco Calvo Serraller, ed., El bodegón español. De Zurbarán a Picasso, exh. cat.
(Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes, Fundación Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa, ), p. . Enrique Valdivieso argues, however, that
the painting at the Prado does not aim at depicting more than the real appearance of a small lamb, prepared for sacrifice.
Valdivieso, ed., Zurbarán. IV Centenario, exh. cat. (Seville: Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, ), p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
L U I S M E L É N D E Z (1716–1780)
Still Life: Fish, Scallions, Bread, and Kitchen Containers, ca. 1760–70
PROVENANCE:
Royal collections, Palacio de Aranjuez, Madrid.
Tufts , p. ; Tufts , no. ; Barcelona , no. ; Gutiérrez Alonso ,
p. ; Madrid A, no. ; Tufts , pp. ‒; Luna , p. ; Garrido-Cherry , pp. ‒, no. ;
Madrid A, no. .
In  the prince of Asturias, the future Charles IV, commissioned from Luis Meléndez an extensive series of still
lifes to decorate the Natural History Cabinet, a private museum that the prince had created at his residence in
the Royal Palace in Madrid. In January , Meléndez submitted most of the commissioned paintings, which
would amount to forty-four works by . That year the paintings were brought to the Casita del Príncipe, a
small manor house near the monastery at El Escorial. His still lifes are traditional in that they provide objective
descriptions while following specific aesthetic criteria in their composition. Meléndez’s works provide an honest
view of daily life and resemble those of the typical seventeenth-century Spanish still life, which are far from the
decorative and lavish still lifes from Northern Europe.
In this work, Meléndez sets the utensils and foods on a rustic wood table and depicts them from a low and
close viewpoint. This is Meléndez’s usual compositional system, which he used for the still lifes that decorated the
Casita del Príncipe in El Escorial after . The narrow and tall format of this painting is shared by other canvases of this series. Still Life: Fish, Scallions, Bread, and Kitchen Containers is remarkable, however, in the number
of accumulated objects it represents. In the foreground are a group of smoked herrings and scallions that protrude
from the edge of the table with a trompe-l’oeil effect. Further back, Meléndez displays a voluminous round loaf
of bread and kitchen items typical of the eighteenth century, such as the rotund earthenware pitcher that contains a utensil with a wooden handle. The pitcher is covered with a piece of a broken plate from Talavera or from
Puente del Arzobispo. It is decorated in a style called rosilla or ramito, which basically consists of a blue flower on
a white background. The pot is in front of an earthenware bowl, or lebrillo, which was made in Alcorcón, an area
famous until the mid-twentieth century for its production of pottery objects. In the background are a wicker basket, a ceramic vinegar cruet, and a conical tin oil cruet. As is fitting for a good painter of still lifes, Meléndez
demonstrates an extraordinary ability to describe textures and materials, and a curiosity about the behavior of
light on different surfaces, ranging from the glistening glazed pottery to rough surfaces such as bread crust.

Juan J. Luna, in Peter Cherry, Luna, and Natacha Seseña, Luis Meléndez Bodegones, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo del
Prado, ), p. . For a description of the materials represented in Meléndez’s still lifes, see Seseña, “De lo pintado a
lo vivo. Objetos y usos cotidianos en los bodegones de Luis Meléndez,” in Luis Meléndez Bodegones, pp. ‒.

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
F R A N C I S C O D E G OY A (1746–1828)
Still Life with Dead Hares, ca. 1808–12
Jean-Luc Baroni, London
PROVENANCE:
Family of the artist, until ; Javier Goya; Francisco Javier de Mariategui y Sola, Madrid,
until ; María de la Concepción Marátegui y Sola and Mariano Goya, –; Francisco Antonio Narváez
y Bordese, Count of Yumuri, Madrid, ; by inheritance to Francisco Antonio Narváez y Larrinaga, Count
of Yumuri, Mardid, ‒; Count Victor-François-Léonard Huyttens de Terbecq, Château MonchyHumières, ca. ; auctioned, Paris, ; Albert-Pierre de Terbecq; sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April , ;
Wildenstein and Company, New York, ; auctioned at Christie’s, New York, ; private collection.
Sánchez Cantón , pp. –; López-Rey , p. ; Gassier-Wilson ,
no. ; Gudiol , no. ; Salas , no. ; London , pp. –; Vischer , pp. –; Vischer
, p. ; Vischer , pp. –; Berlin-Vienna , no. .
An enthusiastic hunter, Goya frequently mentioned hunting in letters to his friend Martín Zapater. In one, for
example, he wrote with pride that on October , , he had killed eighteen animals, among them two hares,
with nineteen bullets. Hunters are the protagonists of his first series of tapestry cartoons () and of a later
series of eleven drawings, two of which are recent discoveries (ca. –). For Still Life with Dead Hares, however, Goya was interested only in the slaughtered animals. Despite his enthusiasm for hunting, Goya did not use
the animals to set up a presumptuous and complex hunting still life. The composition lacks the common attributes of this type of still life, such as rifles or other hunting objects. The painter arranged the hares so that they
cross each other almost at a right angle and made them the sole protagonists of his composition. Only a basket
and two legs from a third hare appear out of the semidarkness of the middle ground. Through the lifeless bodies
of the hares, Goya creates a simple yet dramatic image of a death that came about violently.
The canvas forms part of a series of twelve still lifes that also includes Dead Turkey and Still Life with Sheep’s
Head. The set was executed during the War of Independence, or Peninsular War, which ended in , the year
of the inventory of the painter’s goods, where the series is mentioned in the eleventh entry.
A. R.

Mercedes Agueda and Javier Salas, eds., Francisco de Goya. Cartas a Martín Zapater (Madrid: Turner, ), p. ,
no. .

Pierre Gassier, Les dessins de Goya, vol.  (Fribourg: Office du Livre, ), no. F –F . For recent discoveries, see
Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Goya Drawings from His Private Albums, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, ), p. .

The inventory was published by Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón in “Cómo vivía Goya,” Archivo Español del Arte 
(), pp. ‒.

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
Dead Turkey, ca. 1808–12
Signed in center: Goya
PROVENANCE:
Javier Goya, ; Francisco Javier de Mariátegui y Sola, Madrid, until ; María de la
Concepción Mariátegui y Sola and Mariano Goya, ‒; Francisco Antonio Narváez y Bordese, Count
of Yumuri, Madrid, ; by inheritance to Francisco Antonio Narváez y Larrinaga, Count of Yumuri,
Madrid, ; art market, Barcelona, ; art market, Madrid, ; acquired by the Ministerio de Fomento,
March , ; admitted to Museo Nacional del Prado, March , .
Gassier-Wilson , no. ; Gudiol , no. ; Camón Aznar ‒, vol. ,
p. ; Madrid A, no. ; Pérez Sánchez A, p. ; Morales , no. ; London , no. ;
Madrid A, no. ; Moreno de las Heras , no. ; Vischer , pp. ‒; Lille , no. ; Vischer
, pp. ‒; Bilbao , p. , no. .
Dead Turkey is one of the twelve still lifes mentioned in the inventory ordered by Goya at the death of his wife
Josefa Bayeu in . Ten items from the lot described in the eleventh entry have been identified, but have been
dispersed. These works were completed between  and , at the time of the Peninsular War. As if alluding
to the human atrocities perpetrated during the war—the theme of his etchings The Disasters of War—Goya’s small
still lifes emphasize the violent deaths suffered by the animals depicted in them. Although the still-life genre plays
an insignificant role within the scope of the artist’s work, his contributions to it were revolutionary. In these still
lifes—which are not objective descriptions of decorative household objects—Goya used the animals’ inanimate
bodies as the means for materializing his sense of tragedy. Toward this end, he minimized the number of
depicted elements and swathed the corpses in bright light and unsettling shadows. The turkey, a bird known for
its arrogance and bravery in life, has now become a deplorable victim in death, akin to some of Goya’s negative
heroes. The wretched state of its lifeless body is evident in the twisted neck, outstretched legs, and broken wings.
This painting’s direct insight into death foreshadows one of the concepts characteristic of the realist movement
of the second half of the nineteenth century.

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
Still Life with Sheep’s Head, ca. 1808–12
Signed lower right: Goya
Musée du Louvre, Paris
PROVENANCE:
Goya family, until ; Javier Goya; Francisco Javier de Mariategui y Sola, Madrid, until ;
María de la Concepción Mariátegui y Sola and Mariano Goya, ‒; Francisco Antonio Narváez y Bordese,
Count of Yumuri, Madrid, ‒; private collection, Paris, ; Galerie Paul Rosenberg, ; acquired by
the Musée du Louvre, .
López Rey , pp. ‒; Paris , no. ; Gassier-Wilson , no. ;
Gudiol , no. ; London , p. , no. ; Vischer , pp. ‒; Lille ‒, no. ; Bilbao
, no. ; Vischer , pp. ‒.
Still Life with Sheep’s Head is, along with Dead Turkey and Still Life with Dead Hares, one of twelve still lifes listed in the inventory made by Goya and his son Javier after the death of the artist’s wife, Josefa Bayeu, in . The
fact that it was mentioned in the inventory indicates that the series, priced as a lot at , reales, was probably
completed between  and  during the Peninsular War. Goya emphasizes the violent nature of the death of
the animals, the protagonists of this series of still lifes that seems to echo contemporary historical events. The
mutilated ram evokes the atrocities that take place among human beings during wartime. The still life here is not
far from such terrifying images from Goya’s Disasters of War (‒) as “Great Deed with Dead Men!,” showing bodies mutilated and impaled on a tree trunk.
Goya’s arrangement of the individual elements here was clearly far from random. He arranged each object on
the flat plane of a strongly illuminated table top that almost obliterates the dark background. The ram’s loin is
shown next to the animal’s mutilated head, resting vertically on the ribs in the middle ground. As if using the
blood from the dead animal, Goya luridly signed his name in red below the head of the ram. In  Charles Sterling compared this still life with Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef (, Musée du Louvre). As Bodo Vischer has convincingly demonstrated, however, the formal precedent for Goya’s canvas is found in Italian painting. The flayed
head placed parallel to the foreground plane and the small number of objects echo the macellerias (butcher pictures) of Felice Boselli and the still lifes of Giacomo Nani, respectively. Goya’s still lifes came to have an important influence on modern art, especially the still lifes of Picasso.
A. R.

José López-Rey, “Goya’s Still Lifes,” The Art Quarterly  (), p. .

Bodo Vischer, Goya’s Stillleben. Das Auge der Natur (Petersberg, Switzerland: Michael Imhof, ), pp. , .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Still Life with Sheep’s Skull, Royan, October 6, 1939
Signed upper left: Picasso; dated lower left: 6.10.39
Collection of Vicky and Marcos Micha
PROVENANCE:
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris; Douglas Cooper, until ; William McCarthy, ‒;
Stanley J. Seeger Collection, Sutton Place.
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; BARR , p. ; Munich-Cologne-Frankfurt-
Zurich , no. ; Berlin , no. ; Cleveland-Philadelphia-Paris , p. ; Ullmann , p. ,
fig. ; Rosenblum , pp. ‒; San Francisco-New York , p. , no. ; Bilbao , p. ,
no. ; Vischer , pp. ‒.
Still Life with Sheep’s Skull is very similar to Three Skulls of Sheep, completed one week later on October , .
Both works belong to a series of still lifes with bloodied heads and animal skulls that Picasso made in the town
of Royan, north of Bordeaux, where he had fled at the onset of World War II.
Douglas Cooper, one of the owners of Still Life with Sheep’s Skull, referred to it as “my Goya.” According to
Picasso, this painting was the final result of a process begun by Goya in Still Life with Sheep’s Head (ca. ‒);
also completed during a period of military conflict, in that case the Peninsular War. As he described it: “Goya
began something, and I bring it to an end.”
The formal references in this painting to Goya’s still life are obvious, and further supported by historical proof
of Picasso’s interest in the artist’s work. In  Picasso saw Still Life with Sheep’s Head as well as two other still
lifes by Goya at the gallery of his dealer, Paul Rosenberg. Picasso also tried to persuade the Prado, of which he
was director at the time, to purchase three still lifes by Goya, as documented in a letter from Rosenberg.
Bodo Vischer, however, points to Picasso’s departures from Goya’s Still Life with Sheep’s Head. In Goya’s painting, the ribs are set in the center of the image and become the protagonists of the painting, relegating the sheep’s
head to the middle ground. Picasso, by contrast, reverses this relationship. In his “paraphrase” of Goya’s work,
Picasso demotes the ribs to a discreet secondary position and makes the sheep’s skull the chief subject of the scene.
The large head covers almost the entire canvas. Its jaws are open as if it is screaming, a leitmotif of the artist’s
work since Guernica (, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) and an element that makes
Picasso’s version of the subject significantly more dramatic than Goya’s.
A. R.

Marilyn McCully, Picasso: A Private Collection (London: Cacklegoose Press, ), p. .

James Lord, Picasso and Dora Maar (London: Orion, ), p. .

These were Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks (Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur) and Still Life with Fruit, Bottle,
and Bread, both ca. ‒.

Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Oskar Reinhart, June , , in Bodo Vischer, Goyas Stilleben. Das Auge der Natur
(Petersberg, Switzerland: Michael Imhof, ), p. , n. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Three Skulls of Sheep, Royan, October 17, 1939
Dated center right: Royan 17.10.39
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
PROVENANCE:
Collection of the artist, until ; succession of the artist, –; transmitted by
inheritance to Marina Picasso, ; sold by Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim & Cie., Geneva-New York, to the
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, .
Zervos –, vol. , no. ; Venice , p. ; Munich-Cologne-Frankfurt-
Zurich , p. , no. ; Cleveland-Philadelphia-Paris , pp. –, no. ; Ullmann , pp. –
, fig. ; Cox-Povey , p. ; Rosenblum , pp. ‒, ; San Francisco-New York , p. ;
Bilbao , p. , no. .
On September , , Picasso moved to Royan, north of Bordeaux, where for almost a year he would take refuge
from the war declared the day after his arrival. During this period he completed a series of still lifes with animal
skulls whose expressionistic and emotional quality reflect the uneasiness and tension generated by the European
conflict. Bones and skulls had fascinated Picasso since his youth. Although he had already made a number of
works showing the skulls of bulls, by the time he made this painting he had also become interested in sheep skulls.
His depiction of the three sheep skulls here, showing red flesh still on the bone, is powerfully realistic and reflects
the artist’s direct observation and conscientious study of these objects, as demonstrated by preparatory drawings
in a sketchbook dated between September  and October . In the sketchbook, Picasso made drawings of the
mechanism of the jaw and the joints in a sheep’s head. Pages r and r show the preparatory sketches for the
sheep skulls in the present canvas. And while in Christian iconography the lamb or sheep’s head is a traditional
symbol of sacrifice, for Picasso it represented an eerie carcass that also served, as Dora Maar explained in a 
interview with John Richardson, as wartime rations for Kasbek, the painter’s dog. The bloody heads are also
somewhat reminiscent of Goya’s still lifes, particularly those in his canvas Still Life with Sheep’s Head (ca. ‒),
a work that Picasso saw in  at the gallery of his dealer Paul Rosenberg.
A. R.

Brigitte Léal, Musée Picasso. Carnets. Catalogue des dessins (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, ), vol. , p. .

Quoted in Marilyn McCully, Picasso: A Private Collection (London: Cacklegoose Press, ), p. .

Bodo Vischer, Goya’s Stillleben. Das Auge der Natur (Petersberg, Switzerland: Michael Imhof, ), pp. ‒.

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Still Life with Blood Sausage, Paris, May 10, 1941
Signed lower left: Picasso
Collection of Tony and Gail Ganz, Los Angeles
PROVENANCE:
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris; Buchholz Gallery, Curt Valentine, New York; bought by Mr. and
Mrs. Victor W. Ganz, New York, February , ; Sally Ganz, ‒.
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Janis-Janis , pl. ; Penrose , p. ;
Cleveland-Philadelphia-Paris , no. ; Ullmann , p. ; Daix  p. ; San Francisco-New York
, no. .
Picasso completed Still Life with Blood Sausage at his studio on Grand-Augustins street in Paris on May , ,
during the Nazi occupation. It represents an interior scene at Le Savoyard, a restaurant frequented by the painter
during wartime. The scarcity of food moved the painter to depict humble products, such as sausages, vegetables,
or even flayed animal heads, which were also the topic of several of his canvases, such as Still Life with Sheep’s Skull
() and Three Skulls of Sheep (). The composition shown here is presented more like an interior view than
a still life: the thick wooden table seems to fill the space completely, turning it into a suffocating cell. The
dim leaden light comes from a lamp that is trimmed by the upper edge of the canvas. On the table is a blood
sausage, a bottle of wine, and two artichokes. From a round box peers a piece of cheese that has been unwrapped
from a few sheets of newspaper. In the foreground is a long knife with a pointy tip, an object which the artist represented frequently in his works during the occupation. Even more eloquent are the knives and forks that protrude from the half-open drawer. They are disquieting because their prongs and blades point upward like “souls
out of Purgatory” who seek release from captivity. Picasso probably saw the restrictions that he experienced during the occupation as a true purgatory. The canvas’s leaden feeling is loaded, according to Picasso himself, with
an atmosphere that is “somber and unpleasant, akin to the time of Philip II.”

A. R.
Interpretation by Harriet and Sidney Janis in Picasso: The Recent Years, ‒ (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, ),
pl. , unpaginated.

Ibid., pl. , unpaginated.

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Still Life with Skull and Pitcher, Paris, August 15, 1943
Signed and dated lower right: Picasso  Août 
Courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Cologne
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Buenos Aires.
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Ullmann , p. ; San Francisco-New York
, no. .
In a conversation with Françoise Gilot, Picasso stated that the objects he paints are related to his feelings and are
equivalent to parables. Such a statement, argues Ludwig Ullman, points to the existence of specific meanings
behind works completed during difficult times, such as the Nazi occupation of Paris. In fact, Ullman classified
several types of wartime still lifes. One group deals with the scarcity of food and the restrictions suffered during
the occupation; another is inspired by the traditional theme of the vanitas. Still Life with Skull and Pitcher belongs
to the latter group. The present canvas, completed on August , , shows a pitcher next to a skull, the traditional symbol of the memento mori, as exemplified, for example, in still lifes by Antonio de Pereda. The skull is
the protagonist of several works by Picasso at that time and is also prevalent in the impressive bronze skull that
the artist executed in  (Musée Picasso, Paris). The human cranium appears in another still life dated to the
same day as the one exhibited here and again in a conté crayon drawing completed three days later. In the work
displayed here, Picasso applies red and green with energetic brushstrokes and outlines the pitcher with an intense
zigzag line. It appears as if this baked clay vessel wants to triumph over the menacing skull, which is characterized by its dark eye sockets and prominent teeth. The subject of death corresponds to the reality of life at the time
of the occupation and to the news of the death of Chaim Soutine, a friend whose burial at the Montparnasse
cemetery Picasso attended in mid-August .
A. R.

Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw Hill, ), p. . See also Ludwig Ullmann, Picasso und der
Krieg (Bielefeld: Karl Kerber, ), p. .

See Ullmann, Picasso und der Krieg, p. .

See, for example, the Pereda composition with three skulls, titled Vanitas (, Museo Provincial, Zaragoza)

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso (Paris: Éditions “Cahiers d’Art,” ‒), vol. , no. .

See Ullmann, Picasso und der Krieg, p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Cock and Knife, Paris, February 21, 1947
Signed upper left: Picasso; dated on reverse
Private collection
PROVENANCE:
By exchange from the artist to Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, for a white Oldsmobile convertible;
acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Victor W. Ganz, New York, October , ; sale, Christie’s, November , .
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Gilot , p. ; Misfeldt , p. ; Cleveland-
Philadelphia-Paris , no. : Ullmann , p. ; Daix , p. ; Giménez , p. .
This is the first of two versions of Cock and Knife, completed on February ,  (the second version is in the
Museo Picasso Málaga). The painting is dominated by a light-colored ground and shows a dead rooster with
gray feathers. The bird is tied at the wings and legs, which reach the middle of the composition, and set face up
on a kitchen table with a half-open drawer. A large knife, that seems to have come out of this drawer, rests on a
bowl full of blood. The bird’s neck, which Picasso represents as a square bisected by a diagonal line, is almost
completely severed.
Jean Sutherland Boggs compares the compositional clarity of this canvas to that of the medieval manuscripts
admired by Picasso. Despite the simplicity of the painting’s composition, however, the knife, the blood, and the
rooster are the components of a sacrificial ritual, which Willard Misfeldt sees as symbolizing the war: “In  the
blue-gray cock, its throat now slit, lies dead on an ordinary kitchen table, whose isolation and severity make it
appear almost as an altar. The knife, the instrument of sacrifices, reposes on a blood-filled bowl behind the
victim. It is as if the cock has at last fulfilled its sacrificial role as assigned him in , purging the war years’
gloom of horror.” Evidently, Picasso represents the bird that is the emblem of France as the victim of sacrifice.
Nonetheless, the dead bird had long been a subject in Picasso’s work, beginning with The Dead Birds (). The
way in which the rooster’s legs are tied here also closely resembles the tied limbs of one of the human corpses in
Picasso’s The Charnel House (‒, Museum of Modern Art, New York). This extremely powerful formal
detail turns the simple composition of Cock and Knife into a compelling image of death.

A. R.
Jean Sutherland Boggs, Picasso and Things: The Still Lifes of Picasso, exh. cat. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art,
), p. .

Willard Misfeldt, “The Theme of the Cock in Picasso’s Oeuvre,” Art Journal , no.  (winter ), p. .

Carmen Giménez, Museo Picasso Málaga (Málaga: Tf. Editores, ), p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
J O A N M I R Ó (1893–1983)
The Table (Still Life with Rabbit), Montroig and Barcelona, August 1920–January 1921
Signed and dated lower left: Miró. / 1920.
Private collection
PROVENANCE:
From the artist to Josep Dalmau, Barcelona, by April ; Mr. Demotte, Paris, June  (?);
Mrs. Demotte, Paris, by October ; Galerie Pierre Loeb, Paris, ‒; Gustav Zumsteg, Zurich, ‒;
auctioned by Christie’s, London, June , .
Sweeney , p. ; Cirici Pellicer , no. ; Erben , pp. ‒; Dupin
, no. ; Gasser , p. ; Cirici Pellicer , no. ; Penrose , no. ; Cirici Pellicer , no. ;
Malet , no. ; Erben , p. ; Català-Roca-Permanyer , no. ; Dupin ; pp. , ; Barcelona
, no. ; New York , no. ; Gassner , pp. ‒; Combalía , p. ; Dupin-Lelong ,
no. .
Miró completed The Table (Still Life with Rabbit ) immediately after his return from Paris, where he had traveled
in March of . In June of the same year he arrived in Montroig and began this emblematic work, which groups
together the features of his painting that had been developing during the previous years. On the table Miró
arranges a group of inert objects, vegetables and animals, dead and alive, derived from the rural world in which
the painter was immersed. There is a rabbit next to a rooster, a dried fish by the vegetables, and several artifacts
on a solid table whose central leg is divided into four feet. The undulating shape of these feet evoke the roots of
a tree; they rest on a floor that is sharply faceted and painted in earth tones that suggest tilled soil. On the tabletop are the fruits of nature next to some artisanal objects. Aside from the animals, the foreground is occupied by
an onion that is flanked by a tomato and, at the level of the table’s axis, a red pepper and some vine leaves. The
clay jug of water, or wine, and the silver fish placed on a tray complement the composition.
At first sight the composition seems ingenuous in that each element is painted with careful specificity.
However, its spatial concept, which is characterized by an extreme geometric representation of the floor, the
wall, the table and the cloth, reveal Miró’s dependence on Cubist works by Picasso, whom he met directly
through his gallerist, Josep Dalmau. As Miró himself admitted in , the element that interested Picasso the
most in his composition was the table. “Due to this canvas, Picasso referred many dealers to me. It was an
extremely tight canvas, disciplined, which showed the future direction of my work.” Hubertus Gassner interpreted these objects as symbols of fertility (rabbit, rooster, onion, and pepper) and the Eucharist (grape leaves,
jug of wine, and fish).
A. R.

Quoted in Rosa María Malet, Joan Miró ‒, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Parc de Montjuic, ), p. .

Hubertus Gassner, Joan Miró (Cologne: Dumont, ), p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
MORTAL
S A LVA D O R D A L Í (1904–1989)
Imperial Violets, 1938
Signed and dated lower left: Gala Salvador Dalí 1938
Collection of Plácido Arango
PROVENANCE:
Edward James Collection, ; Museum of Modern Art, New York, ; sale, Sotheby Parke
Bernet, New York, October , .
Rotterdam , no. ; Paris , no. ; Madrid-Barcelona , no. ;
Descharnes , pp. , ; Descharnes-Néret , vol. , pp. ‒, no. ; Bilbao , p. , no. ;
Venice-Philadelphia , no. .
Between  and  the telephone became a recurrent theme in Dalí’s work, appearing in such paintings as
The Enigma of Hitler (, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) and The Sublime Moment (,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). In these works the telephone alludes to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s frustrated attempts at appeasement and his phone conversations with Hitler in the fall of  that resulted in the
Munich Pact. A broken or absent cable symbolizes the failed discussions between European dignitaries and Nazi
Germany at a time when Europe’s destiny depended on the telephone. This is also the context for paintings like
Telephone on a Tray with Three Fried Sardines in Late September (, Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg,
Florida) and the one displayed here. In both compositions the earpiece of the telephone forms part of a still life
set before a dreamlike rocky landscape inspired by the beaches of Cadaqués, and with isolated figures and a house
in the middle ground. Imperial Violets, a work influenced by metaphysical painting, is dated to , the year Dalí
met Sigmund Freud and began preparing his first American exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York,
scheduled to open on March , . In February, before leaving for the United States, Dalí invited his friends
and collectors to , rue de l’Université in Paris to see his latest works, among them Imperial Violets. On that occasion the artist described the source of the image: “The title corresponds to a subject I saw, as I fell asleep at the
theater in Monte Carlo, while looking at the title of the film Violetas Imperiales and, upon waking, saw something
very similar to this painting, specifically the phone.”
A. R.

The pact was nullified when Germany invaded Poland. England and France declared war on September , . On the
significance of the telephone in the work of Dalí, see Eric Bou, Daliccionario (Barcelona: Tusquets, ), pp. ‒.

Quoted in Remilde Hammacher-Van den Brande, et al., eds., Exposition Dalí, avec la collection de Edward F. W. James,
exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beunigen, ‒), no. . The painter is referring to a French film by
Henry Roussell from  (silent) and  (with sound).

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
F R A N C I S C O D E Z U R B A R Á N (1598–1664)
Still Life with Four Vessels, ca. 1658–64
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
PROVENANCE:
Original location unknown; legacy of Francesc Cambó, ; Museu Nacional d’Art de
Catalunya, Barcelona, since .
Mayer , pp. –; Sánchez Cantón , pp. –; Soria , no. ;
Pemán , pp. –, ; Guinard , no. ; Gállego-Gudiol , no. ; Madrid A, no. ;
Fort Worth , pp. –; Pérez Sánchez B, no. ; Madrid A, no. ; Seville , p. ; Cherry
, pp. –; Bilbao , no. ; Scheffler , pp. –.
Another, almost identical, version of this emblematic still life is kept at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
In both canvases, Zurbarán departed from the conventions of the genre, rendering only artificial jars, without the
fruits or foods that are commonplace in still-life painting. He arranged the four vessels like a frieze, on a board
parallel to the frontal plane. Each of these objects, all water containers, is made with a different material and
shape. These were everyday utensils in contemporary Seville, and Zurbarán seems to be paying homage to the
city, which was famous for its pottery manufacturing. The two white jars were made locally, and were known as
alcarrazas, or eggshell, for their thin white clay. The alcarrazas flank a wide-bellied bottle with a long neck, made
from red Portuguese or South American clay. The squat alcarrazas jar at the far right is full of water and placed
on a small polished pewter plate, as is the golden silver cup on the left, which begins the reading of Zurbarán’s
simple and austere composition. The painter lit the composition according to Caravaggesque tradition, using
light to heighten the surface reliefs, as well as the volume, the corporeity of the objects, and the different reflective properties of their materials. A slight incongruence in his representation of shadows indicates that Zurbarán
first studied the objects separately and then juxtaposed them, giving them a rigorous and symmetrical order, until
he achieved a perfectly balanced composition.
A. R.

Martín S. Soria and César Pemán believe it is possible that one of the two versions belonged to the painter’s son, Juan
de Zurbarán, who accurately copied the canvas at the Prado. See Soria, The Paintings of Zurbarán (London: Phaidon
Press, ); and Pemán, “Juan de Zurbarán,” Archivo Español de Arte  (). Recent investigations, however, indicate
that both are autograph works by Francisco. Alfonso Pérez Sánchez, Zurbarán. La obra final: ‒, exh. cat. (Bilbao:
Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, ), no. .

Pottery objects are symbols of Seville: they identify its economic welfare and form part of the hagiography of its
patrons, Saints Justa and Rufina. See Felix Scheffler, Das spanische Stilleben des . Jahrhunderts. Theorie, Genese und
Entfaltung einer Bildgattung (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, ), p. .

Peter Cherry, “Arte y Naturaleza. El bodegón Español en el Siglo de Oro,” Aranjuez, Fundación de Apoyo a la Historia
del Arte Hispánico (Madrid: Fundación Airtel, ). William B. Jordan notes that Zurbarán used the alcarraza again in
the Annunciation (, private collection). See Jordan, Spanish Still-life in the Golden Age, -, exh. cat. (Fort Worth,
Tex.: Kimbell Art Museum, ), pp.  and . See also: William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry, Spanish Still Life from
Velázquez to Goya, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery of Art, ), pp. ‒, .

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Green Bowl and Black Bottle, Paris, spring–summer 1908
Signed on reverse: Picasso
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
PROVENANCE:
Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris, ; bought by Sergei Shchukin, Moscow, by ; transferred to
the Museum of Modern Western Art, Moscow, ; transferred to the new Museum of Modern Western Art,
; transferred to the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, .
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Daix-Rosselet , no. ; Palau i Fabre ,
no. ; Rosenblum , p. .
After a period of mostly figural works, such as those he made around the time of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (,
Museum of Modern Art, New York), Picasso returned to still-life compositions. The painter had already looked
at Iberian and African sculpture as a source of inspiration, and as an aid to take up new formal experiments and
to break with the formal and spatial conventions that were until then characteristic of his paintings. In 
Picasso had met Georges Braque, an encounter that would result in close collaboration between the two artists
and would culminate in the creation of Cubism. Between  and  he studied the work of Paul Cézanne,
who had concluded that all that is in nature can be synthesized into basic geometric shapes, such as a cylinder,
a circle, or a cone. During these two years, Picasso executed a series of still lifes, such as Carafe and Three Bowls
(, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), Still Life with Fruit and Glass (‒, Museum of Modern
Art, New York), and the canvas shown here. Christian Zervos dates this painting to between the spring and summer of , when Picasso’s intense study of Cézanne’s work was already apparent. The simple still life Green
Bowl and Black Bottle, in which the objects are presented on a table before a red and black background, is characterized by order and geometry, with the bowl in front of the bottle. The weighty objects are represented by
their essential forms. Picasso conceives both objects as compact volumes firmly placed on the table. He rejects
verism in his textures as well as spatial illusionism, effects traditionally sought by still life painters in order to
exhibit their skills.

A. R.
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso (Paris: Éditions “Cahiers d’Art,” ‒), vol. , no. , p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, Paris, winter 1909
Oil on canvas, 164 x 132.5 cm
Signed lower right: Picasso
Kunstmuseum Basel
[not in exhibition]
PROVENANCE:
François Leclerq, Paris; bought by the Kunstmuseum Basel, .
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Geelhaar , pp. ‒; Rubin , pp. ‒;
Palau i Fabre , pp. ‒, no. ; Cleveland-Philadelphia-Paris , no. ; Calvo Serraller B,
pp. ‒; Madrid , no. .
In the winter of  Picasso completed one of his most striking still lifes. Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table is
Picasso’s largest still life, and it is presented at some distance from the viewer. On a foldable wooden table is a
bowl full of assorted fruits; among them are a few pointed pears. The ensemble also includes an apple, several
breads, and an upturned bowl. The objects on the table recall the type of still life known as “covered tables,” seen,
for example, in Juan van der Hamen’s The Serving Table (early s), but differ from this type in terms of the
spatial contextualization of the group. Picasso’s canvas seems to deal with an interior setting, which ends in the
background with a set of curtains, rather than with a still life. In conventional still lifes, it is common to present
objects in the foreground, allowing the viewer a closer look.
The peculiar greatness and mise-en-scéne of the table can be explained by the genesis of the painting.
The work was not conceived as a still life from the beginning, but as a scene with characters sitting around a table
where the objects assumed only a secondary role. The origin of the painting is documented in a series of drawings, watercolors, and gouache works commonly known as Carnival at the Tavern, kept at the Musée National
Picasso in Paris. These studies on paper, completed between  and , are proof of the complex creative elaboration of the work. In late , Picasso depicted only five figures, which he progressively reduced from the original group of companions to a still life. William Rubin, who has analyzed the formal and technical references to
the work of Cézanne in the canvas discussed here, sees an homage to this artist’s work in one of the Carnival at
the Tavern studies. Jean Sutherland Boggs has also related the white, upside-down bowl to the right of the table
to a similar bowl in Francisco de Zurbarán’s Saint Hugh in the Refectory (ca. ).

A. R.
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso,  vols. (Paris: Éditions “Cahiers d’Art,” ‒), vol. , no. , p. .

William Rubin identifies the figures in the studies as those of Cézanne, Rousseau, and Fernande Olivier. In November
 the painter held a banquet in Rousseau’s honor.

Jean Sutherland Boggs, Picasso and Things: The Still Lifes of Picasso, exh. cat. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art,
), p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1937
PROVENANCE:
collection of the artist; G. F. Reber, Lausanne, after ‒; Zwemmer Gallery, London,
‒; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, .
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Daix-Rosselet , no. ; Barnett , no. ;
Madrid , no. ; Spector , p. .
Picasso completed Carafe, Jug, and Fruit Bowl in Horta de Ebro, a village in the mountainous province of
Tarragona, Catalonia, where he spent the summer of  with Fernande Olivier. There he completed a number
of bust portraits of Fernande, as well as landscapes and still lifes that precede analytic Cubism, the movement that
would be fully developed alongside Georges Braque two summers later in the district of Céret, in the French
Pyrenees. Picasso and Braque looked to landscape, and especially to still lifes, as the means to renew and rethink
artistic problems. Since they are not dramatic as subjects, still lifes became a privileged vehicle for the exploration
of formal problems, as well as the source for new solutions to the problem of expressing space, composition, and
the effects of light and color. As compared to the still life titled Green Bowl and Black Bottle, from the previous year,
the canvas shown here reflects Picasso’s evolution in his steady journey toward Cubism. The carafe, the fruit bowl,
and the jug appear on a table covered by a tablecloth, seen from above. In  the geometric shapes that make up
the objects in Picasso’s composition become more intense and more fractured. The surfaces of the tablecloth and
curtains are especially distorted and faceted. This effect, however, is still constrained in the representation of the
carafe, the bowl, and the jar. The green apples in the fruit bowl and the reddish tone of the jar in the background
enliven the painting’s subdued tonal range, which would be fully enforced in analytic Cubism after .

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Bottles and Glasses, Paris, winter 1911–12
Oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 64.4 x 49.5 cm
Signed in 1937, lower right: Picasso
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1938
PROVENANCE:
Max Pellequer, Paris, by ; Galerie Pierre Loeb, Paris, ‒; Solomon R. Guggenheim,
New York, .
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Daix-Rosselet , no. ; Barnett , no. ;
Palau i Fabre , no. .
Picasso completed Bottles and Glasses in Paris during the winter of ‒. The painting still shows some of the
characteristics of the Cubism developed by Picasso and Georges Braque during the summer of  in Céret.
Picasso settled in this French village at the bottom of the Pyrenees between July and September and worked
intensely with Braque, who arrived in mid-August, for about three weeks. Together they produced the masterpieces of Analytic Cubism, their most hermetic works. Another key painting for the subsequent evolution of Analytic Cubism was probably completed that summer: Braque’s The Portuguese, in which he included printed letters
within the composition for the first time.
Back in Paris, later the same year, Picasso completed thirty-one still lifes, among them Bottles and Glasses. As
in the works he painted in Céret, Picasso continued to use light arbitrarily, an approach that favors the fragmentation of objects—bottles, glasses of wine, newspapers. The inclusion of printed letters, however, assists in the
visual “reconstruction” of the painting. Joan Rosselet notes that the letters “WAGE” in this work represent an
abbreviation of the English weekly journal The Ne(w Age). Below this reference is “ERETURE
AN,”
which corre-
sponds, although with a typing error, to the right part of the subtitle: “A Weekly Review of Politics, Li(terature
an)d Art.” Finally, the third line shows the price of the journal: “THR” is a fragment of “(Thr)ee Pence.” The reference to this newspaper in the painting comes after the publication of articles on Picasso in the issues dated
November  and ,  of The New Age.
The painter signed the work in , probably at the request of the Parisian gallerist Pierre Loeb.

Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, ‒. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related
Works (London: Thames & Hudson, ), p. . See also José Álvarez Lopera, “El poeta,” in Carmen Giménez and
Francisco Calvo Serraller, exh. cat. Picasso. Tradición y vanguardia (Madrid: El Viso, ), p. .

Daix and Rosselet, Picasso, p. , no. .

Ibid.

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
The Dead Birds, Sorgues-sur-Ouvèze, summer 1912
Signed and dated on reverse: Picasso / Sorgues 
PROVENANCE:
Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris; Alfred Flechtheim, Berlin; acquired by Douglas Cooper, London,
; Douglas Cooper, Argilliers and Montecarlo; bequeathed to the Museo Nacional del Prado, ; Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, since .
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Rosenblum , fig. ; Daix-Rosselet ,
no. ; Madrid , p. ; Paris B, p. , no. ; Palau i Fabre , no. ; Richardson , p. ;
Cleveland-Philadelphia-Paris , pp. –, no. ; Rosenblum ‒, p. ; Bilbao , p. , no. ;
Esteban Leal-Galán Martín-Fernández Aparicio , pp. –.
After  Picasso and Braque developed a Cubist pictorial language to analyze the dislocated reality of shapes.
They reduced forms to geometric diagrams and painted them in a restricted palette, generally of brown, ocher,
gray, and white. They achieved the ultimate expressions of the style in their paintings of  and , works like
Picasso’s Man with a Pipe (, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth) and Braque’s Woman with a Mandolin (,
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid). At the same time, it was becoming clear that their rigorous Cubist
method was making their work increasingly inscrutable. In , therefore, the artists took the style in a new direction: they began integrating letters or painted words into their pictures, as well as introducing trompe-l’oeil effects
and inserting papier collé on the surfaces of their canvases. These are the techniques and methods characteristic of
Synthetic Cubism, the style reflected in this small canvas. (Although this work was completed before they began
to introduce collage.) Here, Picasso deploys the typical limited palette, with brown and ocher, and includes typed
letters reading, for example, “JOU,” short for Journal, or “Le Q DU,” in reference to the newspaper Le Quotidien
du Midi. The outlines of the other objects depicted are also clearer than they were in his earlier Cubist works. The
contours of the glass in the center, where the concentration of light is greatest, are clearly identifiable, as are the
heads and the stiff legs of the dead birds, and the feathers on their spread wings. The group of objects, seen from
above, forms a type of “hunting still life,” a traditional subject since the seventeenth century; to some extent they
also parallel Goya’s still lifes with dead birds, such as Still Life with Woodcocks (ca. ‒, Meadows Museum,
Dallas). Picasso sets his sacrificed animals on a wooden table, characterized by its natural grain. This painting
belongs to a series on the same theme, and was completed during the summer of  at Sorgues-sur-Ouvèze
near Avignon.
A. R.

According to Zervos, this canvas was painted after The Wounded Bird, a simpler composition, and Pigeon in its Nest,
with Eggs. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso (Paris: Éditions “Cahiers d’Art,” ‒), vol. , nos. , . In a personal
conversation with Pierre Daix, Picasso stated that all three works were completed at around the same time. See Pierre
Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, ‒. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works
(London: Thames & Hudson, ), nos. ‒.

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
PA B L O P I C A S S O (1881–1973)
Bottle of Anís del Mono, Paris, fall 1915
Signed lower center: PICASSO
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Bequest of Robert H. Tannahill
PROVENANCE:
Galerie L’Effort Moderne, Léonce Rosenberg, Paris, ca. ; Dr. G. F. Reber, Lausanne, early
s; A. E. von Saher, Amsterdam, before ; acquired from Fine Arts Associates, New York, by Robert H.
Tannahill, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, ; legacy of Robert H. Tannahill to the Detroit Institute of Ats,
.
Zervos ‒, vol. , no. ; Rubin , pp. ‒, fig. ; Daix-Rosselet ,
no. ; Cleveland-Philadelphia-Paris , no. ; Richardson , vol. , p. ; Rosenblum , pp. ‒.
In  Picasso agonized for a long time over the loss of Eva Gouel, his lover from  until her death from cancer in , an event that darkened both his palette and his subject matter. In a letter to Gertrude Stein, written
during Gouel’s last illness, the artist explained that he was barely able to produce any work as he spent most of
his time visiting her in hospital. Nevertheless, during this time he did manage to complete Bottle of Anís del Mono
as well as the famous Harlequin (, Museum of Modern Art, New York), which John Richardson sees as a
reflection of Picasso’s suffering during Eva’s painful death, and whose composition William Rubin compares to
the present canvas. It was during this year that Picasso executed the series of sober compositions that conform to
what came to be known as his “Crystal Period,” to which this painting also belongs. As in previous works, Picasso includes here the emblematic bottle of Anís del Mono, but makes it more prominent this time. He situates the
bottle in the center of an imitation-wood table that is set, along with the rest of the objects (a glass and a playing card), in a red oval over a rectangular dark blue background. Affixed to the multiple rhomboidal facets of the
glass bottle is a label with the inscription “ANIS DEL MONO.” Next to it Picasso places a card of clubs, a traditional symbol of luck. Within the artist’s iconography, however, one must recall Apollinaire’s definition in Les Onze
Mille Verges (The Eleven Thousand Rods, ), the artist’s favorite book: “the ace of clubs presented to the gaze of
lecherous soldiers . . . an admirable display of assholes.” Picasso “signs” this work in the lower central area of the
composition, imitating relief lettering on a copper sign.
A. R.

Picasso wrote this letter on December , , only one week before Eva’s death on December . For a transcription of
the letter, see Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, ‒. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings
and Related Works (London: Thames & Hudson, ), section .

John Richardson, A Life of Picasso (London: Jonathan Cape, ), vol. , p. .

William Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, ),
fig. , pp. ‒.

Quoted in Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. , p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
J UA N G R I S (1887–1927)
The Book, 1911
Signed lower right: Juan Gris
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre de Création Industrielle.
Donation of Louise and Michel Leiris, 1984
PROVENANCE:
Donation by the artist to Louis Marcoussis, ; Paul Eluard, Paris; sale, Hôtel Drouot,
no. , July , ; Louise and Michel Leiris, Paris, –.
Raynal , p.; Kahnweiler , p. ; Gaya Nuño , pp. –; Cooper
, vol. , no. ; Madrid , pp. –, no. ; Bonet-d’Ors Führer , pp. –, , no. ; Madrid ,
vol. , no. .
Gris met Picasso in Paris in  and became a direct witness to the birth of Cubism. The Madrid-born painter
made some attempts at Analytic Cubism in early watercolors and in one oil painting, Siphon and Bottles (,
private collection). It was not until , however, that Gris became fully initiated into the Cubist style that
Picasso and Braque had been developing since around . The Book, along with The Eggs (, Staatsgalerie
Stuttgart), represent Gris’s earliest contributions to this style. For these paintings he chose an intermediate format
that he continued to use throughout his career. According to Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, these were modest efforts,
only slightly influenced by Cubism, for Gris continued to depict the fundamental elements of his compositions
realistically. In the painting referred to here, for example, the distortion of the book and the white cup, as well as
of the pitcher and coffee pot, is quite minimal and contained. Further, the shading is consistent with a single
viewpoint. Seen from a high diagonal perspective, the utensils and the book are clearly represented as individual
entities, grouped on the table with an almost classical cohesion. Gris’s early work ultimately suggests the influence of Cézanne more than that of Braque and Picasso, although The Book recalls some of the works produced
by the two masters during their transition to Cubism. In particular, Gris respected the Cubist preference for grisaille, restricting his palette to gray, ocher, and blue tones and thus achieving a simplicity and stillness in his work
that also echoes the metaphysical still lifes of Giorgio Morandi.

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
J UA N G R I S (1887–1927)
Bottles and Knife, 1912
Signed lower left: Juan Gris
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands
PROVENANCE:
Clovis Sagot, Paris, ca. ; Galerie L’Effort Moderne, Léonce Rosenberg, Paris, ca. –;
Helene Kröller-Müller, The Hague, –; donated to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, .
Kahnweiler , p. ; Otterlo , p. , no. ; Gaya Nuño , pp. ,
, no. ; Cooper , vol. , pp. ‒, no. ; Madrid , pp. –, no. ; Bilbao , pp. –,
no. ; Paris , pp. , , no. ; Madrid , vol. , no. ; Llorens , pp. –; Frontisi ,
p. .
Gris’s still lifes are notable for the limited range of objects they represent. In the artist’s use of modest everyday
items and the static quality of his images, these works can be compared to the Golden Age still lifes by such artists
as Zurbarán or Sánchez Cotán. The geometric simplification of the forms of the jar, the bottle, the glass, the
plate, and the knife in Bottles and Knife is also reminiscent of the still lifes painted by Picasso around  in the
manner of Cézanne. Gris follows, albeit less severely, Picasso’s and also Braque’s models of monochromatic reduction, limiting his pigments to blue, green, and gray. He also renders volumes with the transparency characteristic of the still lifes of these artists, thus unifying the objects with their surrounding space and with the “grid,” an
oblique overall pattern that the painter applied to his still lifes in . The grid allows the viewer to look at objects
as if seeing them “through an overlaid patterned glass that imposes its own internal pattern on the shapes of
things.” In this work, light skims over the surface of the objects, traveling in a single direction, according to natural vision. Gris respects conventional perspective and allows the outlines of the individual pieces to determine
the composition three-dimensionally. Thus the painter avoids the disintegration of natural contours that complicates the reading of objects in still lifes in the style of Analytic Cubism. This painting, which is also known as
Still Life with Bottles and Knife or Still Life with Bottles, was probably one of the fifteen works included in Gris’s
first exhibition in Paris, which opened at the Salon des Indépendents in .
A. R.

Christopher Green alludes, for example, to the clear link between Gris’s canvas and Zurbarán’s two versions of Still Life
with Four Vessels (ca. ‒, Museo Nacional de Arte de Catalunya and Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). See
Green, “Juan Gris, el cubismo y la idea de tradición,” in Gary Tinterow, ed., Juan Gris (‒), exh. cat. (Madrid:
Ministerio de Cultura, ), pp. ‒.

Tomás Llorens, “Juan Gris and the Inner Vision,” in Paloma Esteban Leal, ed., Juan Gris, Paintings and Drawings
‒, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, ), vol. , p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
J UA N G R I S (1887–1927)
The Bottle of Anís, June 1914
Oil, papier collé, and graphite on canvas, 41.8 x 24 cm
Signed on reverse: Juan Gris
PROVENANCE:
Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris, ; fourth Kahnweiler auction, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May , ;
private collection, Paris; Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris; Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, ; Herbert and
Nanette Rothschild Collection, ; Judith Rothschild; Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne; Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 
Einstein , p. ; Camón Aznar , p. ; Gaya Nuño , pp. , ,
no. ; Cooper , vol. , no. ; Madrid , pp. –, no. ; Paris B, no. ; Madrid-Santander
, no. ; Madrid , vol. , p. , and vol. , no. ; Sánchez Vidal , pp. –.
Gris completed this painting—also known as The Bottle of Anís del Mono or simply Anís del Mono—in , a
crucial year for the evolution of his Cubism. Since  he had been experimenting with collage, a technique
based on sticking newspaper pages, article headings from Le Journal or Le Matin, and paper labels to the canvas.
Throughout , in particular, he worked frequently with collage, completing a total of forty works. Gris
achieved such a level of perfection in the incorporation of glued paper onto a work that, like the Anís del Mono
label in The Bottle of Anis, it could not be materially distinguished from the composition’s painted elements.
The anis bottle had become a favored object for many artists since the late nineteenth century. In , for
example, Ramón Casas successfully designed an advertising poster for Anís del Mono, whose label had been created in . Due to its unmistakable multifaceted rhomboidal glass, the bottle became something of an icon for
Cubist painters. Picasso included it in many of the works that he completed in Horta de Ebro near Catalonia in
. The monkey on the label, a major element of Gris’s composition, paraphrases nothing less than Darwin’s
The Origin of Species () and his thesis on the descent of man from the ape. Here Gris uses the bottle, with its
emblematic label, as a compositional scaffold. He bases his design on the bottle’s oblique prism-like shapes and,
with masterly precision, integrates into this system the label with the monkey and two prize medallions.

The bottle of Anís del Mono even appears in paintings by Diego Rivera, Rafael Barradas, and Alberto Sánchez. For a
further discussion of the reception of this bottle, see Agustín Sánchez Vidal, “Eminencia Gris,” in Paloma Esteban Leal,
ed., Juan Gris, Paintings and Drawings ‒, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, ),
vol. , pp. ‒.

A. R.
BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
J UA N G R I S (1887–1927)
Siphon, Glass and Newspaper, May 1916
Signed and dated lower right: Juan gris / -
Ludwig Museum, Cologne
PROVENANCE:
Léonce Rosenberg, Paris; Mme. Poiret, Paris; Zwemmer Gallery, London; Valerie Cooper,
London; Michael Ventris, London; Dr. Werner Rusche, Cologne; Galerie Berggruen, Paris; acquired by the
Stiftung des Wallraf-Richartz-Kuratoriums und der Förderergesellschaft E.V., .
Cooper , vol. , no. ; London , p. ; Bilbao , p. , no. ;
Madrid , vol. , no. .
Among the few recurring objects in the work of Gris is a siphon, a hermetically sealed bottle that allows for the
dispensing of carbonized water. The first painting completed by Gris in , A Siphon (private collection), is
focused precisely on just this object. This peculiar glass container is included again in a larger composition dated
to April  (Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.). In  it appears as part of the group
depicted in the canvas at the Ludwig Museum. On a wooden table that leans on a paneled wall Gris sets a glass
and siphon on a folded copy of the newspaper Le Journal. Gris sets a whole series of compositions completed in
May , when the work discussed here was finished, over the same paneled background. This is the background
in such still lifes as The Coffee-Grinder (Cleveland Museum of Art), and The Packet of Tobacco (John Berggruen
Gallery, San Francisco). That same month Gris executed the portrait of a man over the same paneled background,
which Douglas Cooper believes may be a self-portrait (private collection).
During the years of the World War I, Gris focused on simple compositions based on three elements, which
he arranged diagonally on a table. The blue of the siphon dominates this composition, and it is subtly gradated
to describe the luminous glimmer of the bottle’s crystalline nature and its contents. Gris applies complementary
green hues to the table and a bright orange color to the background. The folded newspaper displays a complex
play of black and white. While part of it (“LE”) is strongly lit, with black letters on white paper, Gris paints the
letters “NAL” as a “negative,” with the letters in white on black paper.
A. R.

See Douglas Cooper, Juan Gris: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint établi avec la collaboration de Margaret Potter, vol. 
(Paris: Berggruen Éditeur, ), p. .

See the note by Miguel Zugaza in Francisco Calvo Serraller, El bodegón español. De Zurbarán a Picasso, exh. cat.
(Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes, Fundación Bilbao Biykaia Kutxa, ), p. .

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
J UA N G R I S (1887-1927)
Still Life with Newspaper, 1916
Signed and dated lower left: Juan Gris / 8-16
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Acquired 1950
PROVENANCE:
From the artist to Léonce Rosenberg, Paris, ; Katherine S. Dreier, West Redding, Conn.,
; on deposit, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, ‒.
Washington , p. ; Kahnweiler , p. XI; Gaya Nuño , p. ; Green
, p. ; Cooper , vol. , p. XII, no. ; Bonet-d’Ors Führer , no. ; Madrid , vol. , no. .
After the German art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler left France in , settling eventually in Switzerland,
Léonce Rosenberg became the primary dealer of the Cubist artists, including Juan Gris, during World War . After
 Gris executed for his new gallerist a series of oil on panel pieces that exhibit a remarkably restricted palette
and classical forms. Following the colorful quality of the “pointillist” still lifes he completed in , Gris turned
black, gray, and brown into the protagonists of his compositions. Still Life with Newspaper, painted on canvas, is
regarded as one of the best works in this markedly austere series. The objects Gris represents belong to his usual
iconographic repertoire: a wine bottle, a fruit bowl, and a newspaper on a dark background. The painter uses
chiaroscuro effects to suggest the volumes and textures of the objects, and their imposing monumentality is
shown under a bright light. The solid shapes of the fruits, for example, are rendered with great technical
accuracy, and the lemon peel on the newspaper appears naturalistic. Gris bases his composition on the subtle harmony of this group of objects, using the play of light and shadow to stress the volumetric quality of the fruit bowl
and to suggest the tactile quality of the tablecloth folded on the table. The austerity and formal rigor of Gris’s
Cubist method are often compared to the still-life tradition of the Spanish Golden Age. Douglas Cooper, for
example, referred to Gris as a twentieth-century Zurbarán whom, he believed, was able to penetrate the essence
of objects in a way that recalled the baroque painter.

A. R.
Douglas Cooper, Juan Gris: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint établi avec la collaboration de Margaret Potter, vol. 
(Paris: Berggruen Éditeur, ), p. XII.

BO D E G O N ES
:
IMMORTAL
S A LVA D O R D A L Í (1904–1989)
The True Painting of the “Isle of the Dead” by Arnold Böcklin at the Hour of the
Angelus, 1932
Signed and dated lower right: Gala Salvador Dalí 1932
Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal
[not in exhibition]
PROVENANCE:
Acquired by the Baron Eduard von der Heydt around .
Stuttgart-Zurich , no. ; Descharnes-Néret , vol. , pp. ‒; Venice-
Philadelphia , no. .
In  Dalí announced that he would dedicate a chapter of his unpublished book, History of Surrealist Painting
Through the Ages, to Island of the Dead (), a painting by the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. Dalí
had probably seen photographs of one of the five works Böcklin had painted on the subject and became preoccupied with the lack of perspective in the painting and its frontal quality.
In The True Painting of the “Isle of the Dead” by Arnold Böcklin at the Hour of the Angelus, Dalí radicalizes and
simplifies the idea of the frontality of landscape. His composition is based on horizontal bands, which constitute
the dark parapet in the foreground right, and a brown plane on the left that is perhaps a curtain. Between glistening sea and cloudless sky is the frontal silhouette of the rock at Cap Creus, Spain, which is the only formal
reference to Böcklin’s painting. Dalí emphasizes the similarity between the rocky cliffs and those at Cap Creus.
Furthermore, Dalí introduces one object that is not in the Swiss painter’s work: a cup balanced on a cube with
a vertical liquid spurt. The meaning of the cup is said to be related to the painter’s erotic fantasies and his first
libidinous experience relating to a childhood friend, Dulita. The importance of this object confirms a second
version of the painting, Giant Half-Cup, Flying with Inexplicable Five Meter-Long Annex (‒, private collection, Basel), begun twelve years later; in this version Dalí pays more attention to the cup, which has become an
object suspended in midair.
A. R.

Salvador Dalí, “Rêverie,” Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution (Paris) no.  (December ), pp. ‒. Reprinted
in Juan José Lahuerta, ed., Salvador Dalí. Obra completa, vol. IV, Ensayos , Artículos, ‒ (Barcelona: Ediciones
Destino, ), pp. ‒, esp. pp.  and .

Lahuerta, Salvador Dalí, p. .

See note in Dawn Ades and Micheal R. Taylor, Dalí, exh. cat. (New York: Rizzoli, ), no. .

Karin von Maur cites this episode in her note: Stuttgart-Zurich : Karin von Maur, Salvador Dalí ‒, exh.
cat. (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, ), p. . See also Lahuerta, Salvador Dalí, p. .


Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso - Home

Transcription

Similar documents

Artfully designed residence in the heart of KL

Picasso minibook

The ELEMENTS of art - Mr Grimm Visual Arts Classes Vance High

catalogue - Escuela de Negocios Afundación

Eugène Delacroix

VINTAGE

Romanticism PDF - Franklin Middle School

Preface - AEclipse

Egyptian Art and Writing

Criticism strategies

Jeune Garçon nu à cheval, 1906