Tavern Still Life, Wine Cask and Chianti Fiasco, Oil on Canvas, Gilt Frame, c. 1920–1950

The Painting

A large horizontal still life in oil on canvas, the tavern table of the old European tradition laid out across four feet of dark green ground: a wine cask on its side with its iron hoops and bung, a tall green earthenware ewer with a banded neck, a straw-covered Chianti fiasco corked and half full of red wine, a brandy snifter catching the light, and across the foreground green apples, a peach, two bunches of grapes, figs split to the flesh, oranges and a pear, with a vine leaf fallen against the barrel. The palette is held almost entirely in green, from the near-black of the shadows through bottle green, sage and the acid green of the cloth, so that the few notes of red and amber in the wine, the fruit and the fig flesh ring against it. The handling is confident and quick, the highlights laid in single strokes, the grapes modeled with a touch of white each, the glass drawn with two reflections and a shadow. It is signed at lower right, Robsey or near it, in a looping cursive that has not been matched to a recorded artist.

The frame is a period American gilt frame of real presence, a wide flat profile with a cove, a reeded sight edge and a black painted back edge, dressed with cast composition ornaments at the corners and the centers of each rail, the gilt rubbed to the red bole on the high points. The painting is stretched on its original bars, tacked, with a wire hanger on screw eyes.

Condition is honest and the price reflects it. The painting has never been cleaned or relined: the varnish has darkened and bloomed in the shadows, there is an overall fine craquelure across the dark ground, a group of concentric impact cracks in the upper right quadrant where the canvas took a blow from behind, light surface grime, small scuffs and abrasions at the edges, a few flecks of paint loss near the margins and a whitish mark at the far left edge. The canvas is sound and taut, the tacking margins frayed as expected, no tears, no patches, no overpaint found. The frame has losses and chips to the gilt and the composition ornaments, wear through to the wood on the rails and old nail holes at the back. Offered as found, a candidate for a conservator's cleaning that would bring the greens back up a full step, and equally at home left exactly as it is.

History & Provenance

The tavern still life is one of the oldest subjects in European painting. The Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century set casks, jugs, roemers and fruit on a ledge against a dark ground and made a moral of plenty and its passing; the Spanish bodegón stripped the same objects down to austerity; and Chardin in the eighteenth century gave the copper pot and the glass of wine the dignity of a portrait. By the nineteenth century the formula had passed from the academies to the trade, and the dark-ground still life of barrel, bottle and fruit became the picture of the dining room, the wine merchant, the restaurant and the hotel bar on both sides of the Atlantic, painted by studio artists who signed their work and sold it through framers, department stores and the decorators' trade. The Chianti fiasco in its straw jacket, the brandy balloon and the green apple are the twentieth-century additions to the vocabulary, and they date this picture to the decades when the Italian restaurant and the cocktail hour were new American institutions.

The frame belongs to the same world. The wide flat gilt frame with applied composition ornament and a black back edge was the stock in trade of the American framer from the 1890s to the 1930s, cast in molds, gilded over gesso and bole, and sold by the foot for exactly this kind of picture. It is at least as old as the canvas and may be original to it.

The painting is signed but unattributed, the signature not matching any recorded artist, and it is offered as the work of an unidentified studio painter. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the hand-tacked canvas on its original stretcher, the oxidized natural resin varnish, the mature craquelure across the ground, the frayed tacking margins and the period composition frame are all consistent with a date between about 1920 and 1950.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A four-foot still life in dark greens is the picture that anchors a room. Over a sideboard in a dining room it does what it was painted to do, and it does it as well over a bar, a sofa, a console in a hall, a kitchen banquette or the mantel of a library, where the greens take warm light beautifully and the gilt frame picks up every candle. It belongs with walnut and mahogany, with leather, brass, copper and old glass, in a traditional house, a wine cellar, a restaurant or a collected modern interior where one dark, large, old picture is the point. Leave the craquelure and the dim varnish, which read as age and depth from across the room, or have it cleaned and watch the apples come forward. For a designer client or a restaurateur it is the big, affordable, period oil with the right subject, the right frame and the right amount of wear.