Eugène-Henri Cauchois (Rouen, 1850 - Paris, 1911)
Nature Morte à la Brioche
Oil on canvas
Size: 60.5cm x 45.5xm (canvas)
Signed
Cauchoi’s still-life glows with an austere, amber and rust-brown colour pallet. From these sombre shades, the titanic subjects of Cauchoi’s still life slowly emerge: the remnants of a discarded breakfast. The painting enacts a drama of juxtapositions: the brioche in its crusty ambers against the dark mauve of the pressed grapes; the jam’s sticky cherry against the flaxen beige of the slice of bread; those rusting yellows at once sticky and muted of some desert wine; that shock of delicate blue on porcelain-white in the knife.
Cauchoi’s painting enshrines both the decadence of a Dutch banquet (à la de Heem) and the sombre austerity of Chardin’s (Paris, 1669-1779) pallet and forms. The composition and thick impasto overwhelm the space with heavy paint and cluttered shapes. Diagonals cross the canvas creating imbalanced tensions: the porcelain knife draws a line that clashes against the conch-shaped pastry, further clashing with the group of vertical lines in the glass and desert flask. This cluttering is made even thicker by the heavy impasto layer of paint (look at the texture of that brioche!). Chardin’s balance of light foreground/dark background is here reversed; Cauchois gradates a program of dark on dark (left) to light on light (right). The result is a wonderfully heavy sense of decomposition in the brioche and grapes with a matching, thick stickiness to the desert-wine and glasses, knife, and spoons.
Still life in French is ‘nature morte’ – dead nature – a reminder of the transient in the beautiful. That sense of futile decadence emerges from Cauchoi’s hazy, amber shades. The breakfast is discarded, half-finished, even rotting. Yet it is beautiful too in its austere grandeur: the crumbling, rich brioche; the empty glass of dessert wine; that beautifully rendered, delicate, blue porcelain on the knife. The ornately carved, French, nineteenth-century pierced and swept frame only enhances the sense of wonderfully heavy decadence.
