Still Life with Game Fowl

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 diagonal from the top-left to bottom-right corners of the niche. In these ways, Sánchez Cotán infused simple objects in a minimal setting with great presence.