Still Life with Game Fowl

Quince, cabbage, melon, and two fowl hang and sit in strict, symmetrical array within a dark stone niche, each form isolated by a raking light so precise that the picture reads as a study in the geometry of nature — the spheres of fruit answered by the cones of the birds. Juan Sánchez Cotán painted the work in Toledo about 1600–1603, just before he left a successful career to enter the Carthusian monastery at Granada, and it is the earliest European still life in the Art Institute’s collection. The picture was probably in the artist’s own studio when he retired, passed to Diego de Valdivieso in 1603, and later hung in the collection of Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, archbishop of Toledo, before entering the royal hunting lodge of El Pardo. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Leigh B. Block.