Year 1875–85 (1875–85) Artist Antoine Vollon Location National Gallery of Art Media Oil paint | Medium Oil on canvas Dimensions 50 cm x 61 cm Created 1875–1885 Genre Still life | |
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Similar Artwork at National Gallery of Art, Still life artwork | ||
Personal impressions renee erickson on vollon s mound of butter
Mound of Butter is a painting by the 19th-century French realist painter Antoine Vollon made between 1875 and 1885. The painting is hosted at the National Gallery of Art. The New York times called the painting one of: Washington’s Crown Jewels.
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Painter
Vollon was best known as a painter of still lifes, even if he painted landscapes and figures too. Vollon was part of the French Realist movement, and in his lifetime achieved celebrity status and earned a number of prestigious awards such as the Legion of Honor. He was called "the Chardin of his day", alluding to the French master of still life paintings, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. In the nineteenth century his paintings were very popular, were collected and thus many of his works today are in private collections. Alexandre Dumas, fils and William Merritt Chase for example, collected his artworks.
Vollon was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and his works were present at the Paris Salon for over thirty years together with other realist French painters like Charles-François Daubigny, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Henri Fantin-Latour and Eugène Boudin, but Vollon is not as celebrated and remembered today as his other French Realist colleagues like Corot and Fantin-Latour.
Painting
The painting is a still life, depicting in a skilled and realistic way a mound of butter, coloured in rich, deep yellow colour, probably from the carotene of the fresh plants that the grazing cows were eating on the fields. At the time when Antoine Vollon lived it was usual to purchase the butter from the farmer, butter that was handmade at the farms. The painting has thick marks after the artist's brushwork, probably meant to illustrate the marks after the butter knife used to spread butter with or the wooden spatula, used to spread the butter with and also used in producing the butter. Kitchen scenes, food preparation and depiction of the everyday things was a usual subject for still lifes in Vollon's time.
After milking, the cream was collected, churned and the butter lumps were kneaded by hand or worked with a spatula to get rid of the moisture from it, because the high amounts of buttermilk were shortening its storage life. Butter was usually stored wrapped in a cheesecloth, in a cool place. In the painting, the butter mound's cloth is falling loosely over a couple of eggs beside it.