Still Life with Asparagus (c. 1880): Art, History and Details

Still Life with Asparagus (c. 1880) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Philippe Rousseau (French, 1816–1887).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Rousseau was profoundly influenced by the atmospheric still lifes of Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), whom the artist and other French painters like François Bonvin (1817-1877) rediscovered in the mid-1800s. A comparison with Chardin's work, also shown in this gallery, indicates that Rousseau similarly depicted foodstuffs on a simple kitchen table, concentrating on rich textures and restrained colors.

Object facts

• Title: Still Life with Asparagus
• Date: c. 1880
• Creator attribution: Philippe Rousseau (French, 1816–1887)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 36 x 65 cm (14 3/16 x 25 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.284

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Weisberg, Gabriel P. The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980.
• d'Argencourt, Louise, Roger Diederen, and Alisa Luxenberg. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999.
• Bernard Lorenceau, letter to Linda Jackson, Feb. 8, 1983.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.