Fish (Still Life)

A great silver hake lies supine on a wooden board beside a pewter platter and a carafe, its pale flanks catching the light, a lemon and a bunch of greens beside it, the whole arranged with the blunt, unadorned gravity of a Dutch still life reworked by a modern painter who had given up on ornament. Édouard Manet painted this large still life in 1864, in the years just before the scandal of *Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe*, and it is one of the few he devoted to the genre, the fish rendered with a realism so direct — the wet gleam of the skin, the rough texture of the board, the dull glint of the pewter — that it seems less a painting than a thing seen. Manet, who always counted the old masters of the Netherlands and Spain among his masters, here brings their dead-game and market-fish tradition into the bright, even light of modern Paris, and the result is a still life that feels, unmistakably, like a manifestation. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.