Still Life with Wine Barrel and Fiasco, Signed Oil, c. 1940–1970

The Painting

Oil on canvas, horizontal, in a gold-finished wood frame. A wine still life arranged against a near black ground, built in greens and blacks with the fruit carrying nearly all the warm color in the picture.

An oak barrel lies toppled on its side at the left, iron-hooped, the staves catching a cold green light along the top. Behind the fruit stands a tall metal ewer with a high looping handle and a punched border at the shoulder, painted as pewter or zinc. To its right, a straw-covered flask of the Italian fiasco type sits in its woven base, the neck bound and sealed in red wax with the cork still standing in it.

Across the front of the table: a brandy balloon holding an inch of red wine, a split peach, two apples turning from yellow to red, a heavy bunch of purple grapes and a paler bunch of green ones with the tendrils drawn out in fine light strokes, two dark figs, a pear, and at the right edge what read as onions or shallots in their papery skins. The cloth beneath is a flat sage green.

Signed in dark paint at the lower right. The hand is cursive, quick, and sits on a textured passage of the canvas, and it has not resolved with confidence under magnification. It reads most nearly as Rohseg or Rohbeg, with a terminal flourish and a period. No artist of that name has turned up in the record, and the painting is offered as unattributed.

The frame is a gold-finished molding with a reeded sight edge and applied composition ornament, a rococo scroll at the center of each rail and a smaller one at each corner.

History & Provenance

What this is, plainly: a competent commercial still life in the long European tradition of the wine table, the kind of picture produced in quantity through the middle of the twentieth century for furniture stores, department stores and decorators. It descends from the Dutch pronk still life and the Spanish bodegon by way of a hundred years of academic teaching, and the barrel, the ewer and the straw flask are stock properties that turn up again and again in the genre.

The fiasco is the one detail that places it geographically. A fiasco is the round-bottomed Italian flask that cannot stand without its woven straw base, long associated with Chianti, and its presence alongside the barrel and the brandy glass points to a Mediterranean subject whether or not the painter ever saw one.

There is no date on the work and nothing on the back has been offered for examination. The execution, the palette and the gold-finished frame with applied composition ornament all belong to the middle of the twentieth century rather than to the nineteenth, and the range given here follows from that. It is an estimate.

One condition finding needs stating clearly, because it is the most important thing about the object after the picture itself. There are several concentric ring crack patterns in the paint film across the dark background, the largest in the upper area above the signature and at least two more at the right. This is impact craquelure, the bull's-eye pattern that forms when a canvas takes a knock from front or back and the paint cracks in rings radiating from the point of contact. The cracks are visible in raking light and largely disappear when the painting is viewed straight on in normal room light. The paint appears stable, with no lifting, cupping or loss where it can be seen, but the damage is there and it is permanent without conservation.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A wine still life is the easiest picture in the world to place, and that is the point of it. It hangs over a sideboard, in a dining room, in a bar, in a wine room, down a hallway where the light is low. Nothing in it needs explaining and nothing in it will fight the room.

This one is better than most of its kind on the strength of the palette. The whole canvas is worked in greens and blacks, which is unusual for the genre and far more livable than the hot browns and golds these pictures normally carry. Against plaster, dark paint, walnut or brass it reads as tonal rather than as decoration, and the only bright notes in the whole thing are the apples, the wine in the glass and the wax on the flask.

The frame is period to the picture and does its job. Buy it understanding the ring cracks in the background: they are honest old damage, they are disclosed, and they are the reason a painting of this size and finish is available at this price rather than three times it.