Emil CarlsenAmerican, 1848–1932May one see it?
Washington, D.C., United States
The owner is known. Whether it is on view today, the museum does not say, and we were not trained to guess.
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).
Smithsonian American Art Museum