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Still Life with Herrings
Jean-Siméon Chardin (French, 1699–1779)
c. 1735
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 58.5 x 50.5 x 8.5 cm (23 1/16 x 19 7/8 x 3 3/8 in.); Unframed: 41 x 33.6 cm (16 1/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Chardin reflected intensely on the act of observation. Still life became a forum for sophisticated performances in paint, and his complex technique—he famously worked in private—uses a staggering combination of delicate glazes and roughly dragged thick paint to capture the varied surfaces, atmospheres, and spaces in this humble pantry shelf. Acutely aware of recent developments in optics and physics, Chardin explored ideas about light, shadow, and color, and fully expected his work to be inspected closely.
