Still Life: Fish – (William Merritt Chase) Previous Next


Artist:

Date: 1908

Size: 102 x 115 cm

Museum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, United States Of America)

Technique: Oil On Canvas

Beginning in 1904, Chase made many large-scale still-life paintings of fish, usually during his summer teaching trips to Europe. Executed with the bravura brushwork and dark palette of his early Munich period, this painting shows the influence of Chase"s contemporary, the French artist Antoine Vollon, and of the seventeenth-century Spanish still lifes that Vollon also appreciated. The canvas shows a tabletop with a plate containing a striped bass and a salmon; a weakfish lies directly on the table and a bowl appears in the background. Chase"s goal seems to have been to make what he called "an uninteresting subject so inviting and entertaining by means of fine technique that people will be charmed at the way you"ve done it."Writing in "The New Republic" in March 1917, the American connoisseur and collector Leo Stein commented on Chase"s still-life paintings of fish: "Of all non-sentimental still life . . . they are with their bulging mass and sweeping line the most expressive. Chase seems to take a saturated satisfaction in the swell and swing of the thick soft-bodied fish. They give far more result at a lesser price of organization than groups of smaller or less expressively shaped objects."

This artwork is in the public domain.

Artist

Download

Click here to download

Permissions

Free for non commercial use. See below.

Public domain

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However - you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the watermark.

This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.


Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the rule of the shorter term. Côte d'Ivoire has a general copyright term of 99 years and Honduras has 75 years, but they do implement that rule of the shorter term.