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Still Life with Violin, Ewer, and Bouquet of Flowers

1657
Not on view
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.
With its profusion of costly objects, beautiful flowers, and mouth-watering fruit, Bernard’s canvas is typical of the ostentatious tendency in seventeenth-century illusionistic still-life painting that appealed especially to aristocratic collectors. Known in Holland as pronkstillevens, these lavishly decorative pictures held much less appeal for the Cubists than mundane tavern and kitchen still lifes by the likes of Van de Velde and Meléndez. But Picasso had this tradition in mind when he began work on the complex, cascading composition of Still Life with Fruit Dish on a Table (shown alongside) in Avignon during the summer of 1914.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Still Life with Violin, Ewer, and Bouquet of Flowers
  • Artist: J. S. Bernard (probably French, active 1650s–1660s)
  • Date: 1657
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 32 x 39 1/2 in. (81.3 x 100.3 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of the Christian Humann Foundation (2008.55)
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art