NARRATOR:
Édouard Manet is famed for his figure paintings, but he felt that still-life paintings had great power. He once said that “a painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.” Here, a simple grouping of fish and shrimp reveals much about Manet’s approach to art.
At first glance, the arrangement seems casual, as if someone has just returned from the market and placed the unwrapped seafood on the counter. It’s very different from a still-life obviously composed by the painter for aesthetic or symbolic reasons. But the longer we look at this array, the more complexity it reveals. The fish and simple white napkin occupy nearly a third of the canvas. The dark, flat background creates a very shallow space, pushing the arrangement nearly into our space. But Manet counters this claustrophobic feeling by carefully placing the fish to create a sense of openness. The salmon’s tail curves gracefully, sweeping up toward the right corner, while the snout of the needle fish points downward, extending past the edge of the painting. That leads our eye beyond the confined space of the canvas, bringing energy to this quiet subject. The parsley beneath the fish, added with quick, irregular brushstrokes, further animates the scene.
Texture and color are also surprisingly dynamic here. With a limited palette of brown, gray, coral and white, Manet conveys the shiny, silvery quality of the fishes’ skin—and captures the texture of a real fish with thick dabs of oil-rich paint.
Still Life with Fish and Shrimp
1864
Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)
On View
As the critic Émile Zola explained in 1866, “Even the most determined enemies of Édouard Manet’s talent admit that he paints inanimate objects well.” Unlike the ambitious figure paintings he sent to the Salon year after year, Manet’s modest still lifes were universally admired in his own time. Stripping the genre of its allegorical associations—fasts and feasts, time, the seasons, the senses—compositions like this one excused early viewers from the need to decipher a story or conventional meaning, freeing them instead to admire Manet’s deft, succinct application of paint, evident in the salmon’s glittering, impasted scales, the long, elegant strokes of the needlefish’s head, and the dainty, filigreed shrimp.
Details
- Artist Name: Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)
- Title: Still Life with Fish and Shrimp
- Date: 1864
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 17-5/8 x 28-3/4 in. (44.8 x 73 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.1978.25.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
Jean Dollfus, by 1884.
Madame Besnard, Paris.
Marquis de Biron, Paris, by 1902 until at least 1926.
[Paul Rosenberg, Paris];
[Durand-Ruel, Paris];
Edith Dunn (Mrs. Alfred Chester) Beatty, London, by 1932, by inheritance to;
Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875-1968), London and Dublin, sold 16 March 1955 to;
[Paul Rosenberg, New York; stock no. 5611, offered 12 March 1959 and subsequently sold 8 February 1960 to];
Donald Ellis Simon, Los Angeles and Paris, bequest to;
The Norton Simon Foundation, Los Angeles (sale, New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 3 May 1973, lot 28, ill., as Nature morte aux poissons, bought-in);
[Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, sold 1978 to];
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Madame Besnard, Paris.
Marquis de Biron, Paris, by 1902 until at least 1926.
[Paul Rosenberg, Paris];
[Durand-Ruel, Paris];
Edith Dunn (Mrs. Alfred Chester) Beatty, London, by 1932, by inheritance to;
Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875-1968), London and Dublin, sold 16 March 1955 to;
[Paul Rosenberg, New York; stock no. 5611, offered 12 March 1959 and subsequently sold 8 February 1960 to];
Donald Ellis Simon, Los Angeles and Paris, bequest to;
The Norton Simon Foundation, Los Angeles (sale, New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 3 May 1973, lot 28, ill., as Nature morte aux poissons, bought-in);
[Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, sold 1978 to];
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Exhibition of French Art 1200-1900
- London, Royal Academy, 1932-01-04 to 1932-03-05
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- Kennedy, Brian P., Irish Arts Review, pp. 45, 49, 50, 51
- Newsweek, p. 105
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- Darragon, Éric, Manet,fig. 116
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- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1,2006,
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- Bajou, Valérie, Frédéric Bazille 1841-1870,fig. 57 pp. 91, 117
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