Still Life with Herrings (c. 1735): Art, History and Details

Still Life with Herrings (c. 1735) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Siméon Chardin (French, 1699–1779).

The work and its context

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

Chardin reflected intensely on the act of observation. Still life became a forum for sophisticated performances in paint, and his complex technique—he famously worked in private—uses a staggering combination of delicate glazes and roughly dragged thick paint to capture the varied surfaces, atmospheres, and spaces in this humble pantry shelf. Acutely aware of recent developments in optics and physics, Chardin explored ideas about light, shadow, and color, and fully expected his work to be inspected closely.

Object facts

• Title: Still Life with Herrings
• Date: c. 1735
• Creator attribution: Jean-Siméon Chardin (French, 1699–1779)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 58.5 x 50.5 x 8.5 cm (23 1/16 x 19 7/8 x 3 3/8 in.); Unframed: 41 x 33.6 cm (16 1/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1974.1

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hôtel Drouot. Tableaux anciens et modernes de l'école franc̦aise. March 30, 1857.
• "Chronique, Documents, Faits Divers," Revue Universelle des Arts, VI (1857).
• Rouillard. Tableaux anciens. April 28, 1860.

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.