Calf’s Head and Ox Tongue

Gustave Caillebotte, the chronicler of modern Paris — the boulevards, the balconies, the rain-washed streets — painted this still life about 1882, in the same productive years as his great views of the city, when he was also experimenting with the decorative still lifes and the uncompromising butcher-shop subjects that set him apart from his Impressionist colleagues. The raw-meat still life had entered European painting with Chardin and the Dutch market pieces, and Caillebotte’s version treats the theme with the same matter-of-fact directness he brought to his urban scenes, the subject’s physical plainness given the full scale of a history picture. The canvas remained little known until it entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, and it has since become one of the most celebrated of his rare still lifes. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.