Still life with pheasants
Artist
Anonymous
CultureFrench
Dateca.1860
MediumAlbumen print from collodian negative
Credit LineGift of Bruno Tartarin
Object number2024.21.3
On View
Chrysler Museum of Art, Gallery 228
Label TextUnknown photographer
French, active 1850s–60s
Untitled (Still life with game birds),ca. 1860
Albumen print from collodion negative
Seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes included dead game animals to suggest the bounty
of nature, the fragility of life, and the skill of aristocrats who were allowed to shoot and then feast upon them. Photographers imitated these compositions, which they sold as artistic studies. This print of a small pheasant bound with two partridges and suspended before a plain wooden panel has greater immediacy than most painted
prototypes, because its eternally still subjects were arranged outdoors in natural light.
Gift of Bruno Tartarin
Exhibition History"New Frames of Reference: Early French Photographers at Home and Abroad," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va, gallery 228, September 5, 2024 - February 16, 2025.