Red Mullets

Monet painted this composition at the end of a decade marked by the impressionists’ sustained experimentation with still-life painting. His depiction of this pair of common fish is indebted to the myriad styles that had influenced him and his contemporaries during the 1870s. These included the large flower paintings of the romantic artist Eugène Delacroix, who died in 1863, and Edouard Manet’s studied reinterpretations of the Spanish, Dutch, and French still-life traditions. Manet’s emulation of the work of the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Siméon Chardin was particularly influential, as it coincided with critical reexamination of Chardin’s career in the 1860s, heralding him as the great French master of still life. Monet’s closely cropped view of fish on a white cloth reveals his attentiveness to these precedents, while his elevated viewpoint highlights the food’s imminent preparation for consumption.