Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Still Life with Dead Birds and a Basket of Oysters
Germain Ribot (French, 1845–1893)
c. 1860–80
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Unframed: 46 x 55.3 cm (18 1/8 x 21 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Bequest of Noah L. Butkin
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Against a dark brown background, Ribot painted a basket filled with oysters. Light coming from the left is gently cast over the wicker basket. A dead magpie, with its white chest and long black beak, emerges from the shadows at the left. This bird, along with the partridge in the foreground, the jay toward the back, and what appears to be a sparrow at the right, are probably located in a kitchen, where preparations for cooking will soon begin. Germain Ribot, who painted genre (everyday life) scenes and still lifes, was the son of the more famous Théodule-Augustin Ribot (1823-1891), known for his working-class and peasant subjects.
