Still Life with Ewer, Books, and Grapes (Nature Morte à l’Aiguière, aux Livres, et aux Raisins)

1870s

Medium

Translucent watercolor over graphite with touches of blue and red opaque watercolor

Dimensions

22 × 30 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-208099

Grapes cascade off a fruit-laden platter surrounded by drinking vessels, vellum-bound tomes, and an intricately decorated ewer. Staged between a light-soaked foreground and moody, nondescript background, Eugène Isabey depicts the assorted objects in a luminous still life. The skillful handling of wet-on-wet watercolor renders color and form in a complex and sophisticated manner, also made apparent by the exceptionally good preservation of the sheet. The ewer at left, notable for its elegant form and bright blue detailing, lends the scene an air of exoticism. The sheet - the only known still-life watercolor by the artist - is simultaneously in dialogue with the seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas still-life tradition and the nineteenth-century French Orientalist mode.