Still Life with Herring, Bread, and Cheese (1858): Art, History and Details

Still Life with Herring, Bread, and Cheese (1858) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French, 1803–1860).

The work and its context

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

This painting forms a pair with the Still Life with Pipe and Matches. Along with several other paintings, they decorated the dining room of the artist's home, each painting representing a different stage of a meal. In this composition the artist focused his attention on rendering textures, which are as varied as the objects themselves: the skin of the smoked herrings, whose highlights echo the silver of the goblet and the cover of the pitcher; the spongy surface of the bread; the velvety crust of the cheese; and finally the soft wood surface (pine?) that supports this still life. The Latin inscription translates: "How virtuous and how great to live with simple things."

Object facts

• Title: Still Life with Herring, Bread, and Cheese
• Date: 1858
• Creator attribution: Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French, 1803–1860)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Unframed: 63 x 38 cm (24 13/16 x 14 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.254.2

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.
• Herring, Sarah. The Nineteenth-Century French Paintings. London : National Gallery Company, 2019.
• Delapierre, Emmanuelle. "Dans la Cuisine de Ribot: le Realisme de l'Objet." In Théodule Ribot, 1823-1891: Une Délicieuse Obscurité. Emmanuelle Delapierre, Luc Georget, Gabriel Weisberg, eds., 58-117. Paris: LienArt, 2021.

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.