Jean-Frederic Bazille (1841–1870), France, Still Life with Fish, 1866, oil on canvas, 25 x 32 ¼ in. (63.5 x 81.9 cm), Detroit Institute of Arts; Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, 1988.9

Audio Description

Still Life with Fish is a two-foot wide oil painting on canvas made in 1866 by the French artist Frédéric Bazille, who lived from 1841 to 1870. It was a Founders Society Purchase, with the Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund for the Detroit Institute of Arts, where its reference number is 1988.9.

A thick tan butcherblock partially covered by a rumpled white tablecloth occupies the lower two-thirds of the canvas. Two whole fish are centered on the surface—a thin silvery pike, whose head sticks over the front edge, and a larger reddish carp behind it. At the back left of the butcherblock is a shallow handled basket full of mussels. The dark background gives no indication of the surrounding space.

Label Copy

Still Life with Fish is a two-foot wide oil painting on canvas made in 1866 by the French artist Frédéric Bazille, who lived from 1841 to 1870. It was a Founders Society Purchase, with the Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund for the Detroit Institute of Arts, where its reference number is 1988.9.

Still Life with Fish is one of two paintings that Frédéric Bazille made to submit to the 1866 Paris Salon, the premier annual art event of the time. The other—a “modern” subject of a domestic interior with a young couple at a piano—was rejected, while this work, seemingly a more traditional subject, was accepted as the artist’s first Salon painting.

Despite the masterful depiction of texture and detail in the picture—the fishes’ scales, the stained butcher block, the coarse cloth—critics at the time found fault with its dark palette and compressed depiction of space. It is precisely these qualities Bazille’s painting shares, to varying degrees, with those by Cézanne and Manet, also on view here, both of which he may have seen shortly before making this still life.

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