Still Life with Violin, Ewer, and Bouquet of Flowers
J. S. Bernard French
Not on view
With its profusion of costly objects, beautiful flowers, and mouth-watering fruit, Bernard’s canvas is typical of the ostentatious tendency in seventeenth-century illusionistic still-life painting that appealed especially to aristocratic collectors. Known in Holland as pronkstillevens, these lavishly decorative pictures held much less appeal for the Cubists than mundane tavern and kitchen still lifes by the likes of Van de Velde and Meléndez. But Picasso had this tradition in mind when he began work on the complex, cascading composition of Still Life with Fruit Dish on a Table (shown alongside) in Avignon during the summer of 1914.
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