Past Exhibition

Still Lifes of the Golden Age

Fruit, flowers, birds, small animals, insects, and fish are piled in and set around a woven basket in woodland setting in this vertical still life painting. The color palette is dominated by rich colors of emerald and pine green, plum purple, butter yellow, and pumpkin orange, with touches of silver and robin’s egg blue. The scene is lit strongly from our left, and the background is swallowed in shadow. The wicker basket with its tall, arched handle has been set before a rough-hewn, stone archway. Birds perch in the tree branches above the basket and on the handle. The fruit in the basket includes green, red, and purple grapes, peaches, plums, oranges, and yellow pears. Tendrils of wheat wind through the fruit and leaves, and around the handle. Green, striped gourds sit to our left next to a cantaloupe at the foot of the basket. Green frogs, a living and a dead lizard, a caterpillar, snail, and insects sit, lie, or move on the dirt ground around the gourds and melon. To our right, about a third of the way up the composition, worms spill out of a wooden box from which hang several fishing lines holding silvery fish. A small, ivory-white butterfly with black markings and a patch of vivid orange on each wing sits on the lid of the box. Above the box of bait, a nest with four cream-white eggs is tucked among the branches of a hibiscus plant with pale blue, flaring blossoms. A mossy, narrow oak tree trunk bearing acorns rises behind the basket, in front of the stone arch, and off the top edge of the painting. A fishing rod and a cylindrical wooden case painted golden yellow with rust-red designs are propped at the back of the basket. Dark silhouettes of cattails, rocks, and frogs are shown around a pool of water in the lower left corner.
Abraham Mignon, Still Life with Fruit, Fish, and a Nest, c. 1675, oil on canvas, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. John Heinz III, 1989.23.1

Details

  • Dates

    -

  • Locations

    East Building, Mezzanine, Northwest
Fruit, flowers, birds, small animals, insects, and fish are piled in and set around a woven basket in woodland setting in this vertical still life painting. The color palette is dominated by rich colors of emerald and pine green, plum purple, butter yellow, and pumpkin orange, with touches of silver and robin’s egg blue. The scene is lit strongly from our left, and the background is swallowed in shadow. The wicker basket with its tall, arched handle has been set before a rough-hewn, stone archway. Birds perch in the tree branches above the basket and on the handle. The fruit in the basket includes green, red, and purple grapes, peaches, plums, oranges, and yellow pears. Tendrils of wheat wind through the fruit and leaves, and around the handle. Green, striped gourds sit to our left next to a cantaloupe at the foot of the basket. Green frogs, a living and a dead lizard, a caterpillar, snail, and insects sit, lie, or move on the dirt ground around the gourds and melon. To our right, about a third of the way up the composition, worms spill out of a wooden box from which hang several fishing lines holding silvery fish. A small, ivory-white butterfly with black markings and a patch of vivid orange on each wing sits on the lid of the box. Above the box of bait, a nest with four cream-white eggs is tucked among the branches of a hibiscus plant with pale blue, flaring blossoms. A mossy, narrow oak tree trunk bearing acorns rises behind the basket, in front of the stone arch, and off the top edge of the painting. A fishing rod and a cylindrical wooden case painted golden yellow with rust-red designs are propped at the back of the basket. Dark silhouettes of cattails, rocks, and frogs are shown around a pool of water in the lower left corner.
Abraham Mignon, Still Life with Fruit, Fish, and a Nest, c. 1675, oil on canvas, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. John Heinz III, 1989.23.1

Overview: 44 paintings were shown from the collection of Senator and Mrs. H. John Heinz III of Pennsylvania. The exhibition included rare Dutch, Flemish, and German still lifes from the late 16th to the early 18th century, by artists such as Jan Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Claesz., and others.

Organization: The National Gallery organized the exhibition. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern baroque painting at the National Gallery, and Peter C. Sutton and Theodore E. Stebbins of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, selected the paintings in consultation with the Heinz family. Peter Tillou and Ingvar Bergström, both authorities on northern European still lifes, were consultants, as well as Charles S. Moffett, senior curator and curator of modern painting at the National Gallery. Exhibition curators were Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.; Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, professor emerita of the history of landscape architecture, Harvard University; and Lawrence O. Goedde, associate professor of art history, University of Virginia. Gaillard Ravenel and Mark Leithauser designed the exhibition, and Gordon Anson designed the lighting.

Attendance: 149,397

Catalog: Still Lifes of the Golden Age: Northern European Paintings from the Heinz Family Collection, edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989.

Other Venues:

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 10/04/1989–12/31/1989

You may also like

Exhibition:  Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985

Several white lines swirling around on a black background.

Exhibition:  The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art