Austrian School

Description:

C. 1800
144 x 111 cm o.R.
Great Kitchen Still Life. Oil/canvas, relined.
Private collection, Saxony. The so-called kitchen piece has a long tradition in the history of European still life painting. It developed mainly from the mostly large-format paintings depicting market scenes by painters such as Pieter Aertsen (1509-1575) and Joachim Beuckelaer (1530-1573). But even in Beuckelaer's work, the figures often remain mere decoration, while game, meat, fish and vegetables overgrow the scene like a ‘hidden object picture’. Pure still life painting became established at the latest with Frans Snyders and his circle (1579-1657). Paintings with lavishly filled pantries, hunting scenes against a landscape backdrop, kitchen scenes with preparations for a grand banquet, right up to the sophisticatedly composed, small-format banquets of the Dutch and Flemish painters of the 17th and early 18th centuries.
The canvas painting presented here is a mixture of pantry, kitchen and hunting scene. Fresh market purchases are clearly laid out: pheasant and partridge (hanging), wild ducks, and songbirds lying on top of the bulging basket. On the left side of the wall, a hare is stretched out, underneath it on the stone slab are two lobsters (one cooked, one raw), next to them, still in the net, are two fish. In the wall niche are simple utility vessels, a glass bottle, a pewter storage vessel and a cup. The most striking utensil, however, is a bright ochre bast mat lying under the basket and poultry... A ‘base’ that appears extremely rarely in still lifes and possibly points to the Tyrolean or Upper Austrian region.