Still Life with Plaster Cupid

c. 1894

Oil on paper on board, 70.6 × 57.3 cm. The Courtauld Gallery, London

A small plaster cupid stands among apples and onions in a crowded studio corner, with canvases leaning on the wall behind it. The painter's own workroom and props become a puzzle about seeing.

The floor tilts steeply upward, and the depth of the room is hard to judge. Space is bent so that the whole design holds together.
A sprouting onion sits where real produce and the fruit painted in the canvases behind seem to blur.
Look at the far corner, where a green apple seems much too large.
It is painted in oil on paper laid down on board, not on canvas.
It came to the Courtauld Gallery with Samuel Courtauld's bequest in 1948.

The cast copies a small seventeenth-century sculpture. Samuel Courtauld bought the painting in 1923 from the Glasgow dealer Alex Reid.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art