Still Life with Game Fowl

Notes from the museum

Still Life with Game Fowl is the Art Institute’s earliest European still-life painting. Still life emerged as an independent genre in European art in the sixteenth century, when artists began to specialize in such categories as landscape, portraiture, and scenes of everyday life. Some, like Juan Sánchez Cotán, became interested in displaying their skill at depicting inanimate objects, in part as an expression of the order and variety of the natural world. The painter’s focus changed in 1603, however, when he left a successful, two-decade artistic career in the Spanish city of Toledo to become a lay brother of the Carthusian order at the Charterhouse of Granada. Accordingly, he changed his focus from still lifes to religious images. This painting was executed just before Sánchez Cotán left Toledo. It follows the conventional format of his still lifes: precisely rendered forms displayed in a shallow niche. In some works, he depicted few objects; in others, such as this example, he filled the space with them. The artist rigorously organized the composition so that the complex symmetry of the objects echoes the elegant geometry of the spherical quince, cabbage, and melon and the conical birds. A strong, raking light creates a lively play of brightness and shadow over each shape. This arrangement is further enlivened by a subtle compositional device—the hanging objects form a diagona

Text: Art Institute of Chicago (open access). Our full story for this work is coming soon.

Slow Look

1. The whole picture Let your eyes wander. Where do they want to rest?
2. The light Find the brightest spot. What is it showing you?
3. The edges Look at what is half cut off at the borders.
4. One small detail Choose one tiny thing and stay with it for a while.
5. The whole picture again Step back. Has it changed for you?

About Juan Sánchez Cotán

Juan Sánchez Cotán was a Spanish Baroque painter, a pioneer of realism in Spain. His still lifes and bodegones were painted in an austere style, especially when compared to similar works in the Netherlands and Italy.

Painter profile →