Painting Detail
Still LifeArtist: Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps
Medium: Painting, Oil on panel, 28x24 cm
Date: First half of the 19th century
Genre: Still Life Painting
Source: Museum of the Academy of Arts, Petrograd, 1922
Decamps composed this still life of a very unusual selection of objects: in the centre, suspended from one hook, are a hare and a cockerel, the dark feathers of the latter effectively contrasting with the white background of the cloth; to the left is an empty hook, and to the right a tin lamp hanging crookedly from another hook, while at the bottom we can just see the top of a chair. The central, strictly balanced composition is on symmetrical principles, and yet it creates not the impression of an artificially created ensemble, but of a natural fragment of reality.