American Art Collaborative

These slippery haddock are fresh from the sea and ready for cooking. Emil Carlsen's painting is one in a series of still lifes showing game, fish, and household utensils. The artist was inspired by the eighteenth-century French painter Jean Simeon Chardin, whose paintings he saw during a six-month stay in Paris in the late 1870s. Carlsen exhibited his still-life scenes in Boston, where they earned him critical and commercial success. This painting was a gift to his friend the artist Kenyon Cox, whose works appear elsewhere in this collection (Hiesinger, Quiet Magic: The Still-Life Paintings of Emil Carlsen, 1999)