Still Life with Game Fowl  1603

This work, the earliest European still life in the Art Institute’s collection, was painted by a leading Spanish practitioner of this new genre. It employs Juan Sánchez Cotán’s signature format: commonplace edibles placed in a shallow, niche-like embrasure with an impenetrable, dark background evoking the larders in Spanish homes used to keep food fresh. Some of the artist’...