The Salmon
Artwork by Edouard Manet • 1869
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About this artwork - painting analysis
Édouard Manet presents with The Salmon a bold still life that testifies to his fascination with the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century while asserting his resolutely modern style. Painted in 1869, this painting displays on a white tablecloth with generous folds the remains of a meal: an imposing partially consumed salmon presides at the center of the composition, accompanied by a stemmed glass, an elegant carafe, a bowl decorated with blue motifs containing a cut lemon, and a few lemons arranged on the table. A knife with a black handle extends the diagonal of the fish, conferring upon the whole a subtle dynamism that breaks with traditional symmetry.
The chromatic palette reveals all of Manet's virtuosity in the treatment of tonal values. The warm browns of the background contrast magnificently with the luminous whiteness of the tablecloth, while the silvery reflections of the salmon's flesh capture light with striking accuracy. The touches of brilliant yellow from the lemons bring a vibrant note that guides the eye through the composition. The brushwork, frank and rapid, characteristic of the painter, confers upon the work a modern immediacy that moves away from academic polish. This freedom of execution announces the impressionist audacities to come.
Realized during a pivotal period when Manet affirms his role as a precursor of pictorial modernity, this still life engages in dialogue with tradition while emancipating itself from it. The artist borrows from the Flemish masters their taste for material details and rigorous composition, but reinterprets them with a chromatic frankness and an economy of means that still scandalize his contemporaries. Housed at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, The Salmon illustrates this unique capacity of Manet to transform a mundane subject into an aesthetic manifesto, making easel painting a laboratory of visual experimentation that would durably influence Western art.
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Image license: faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.
