On Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose”

Francisco de Zurbarán, Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) 

Peter Schjeldahl, in his absorbing “Brotherhood,” in this week’s issue, reviews The Frick Collection’s Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition, Jacob and his Twelve Sons – thirteen portraits depicting life-size figures from the Old Testament. He notes that in one of the portraits, Asher (1640-45), the subject is “carrying a basket of bread loaves that display Zurbarán’s subtle mastery of still-life.” I smiled when I read that, recalling Schjeldahl’s superb “Bearing Fruit” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2009), in which he beautifully describes Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633):

“Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (1633), the artist’s only signed and dated still-life, amounts to three pictures, side by side, in one: a silver plate holding four citrons (baggy, nubbly cousins of lemons); several oranges with stems, leaves, and blossoms, heaped in a basket; and a two-handled gray ceramic cup, apparently filled with water, on another silver plate, with a pale-pink rose facing it from the plate’s lip. The objects rest on an oxblood-brown table against a pitch-black ground; sunlight rakes them from the left. Scholars speculate that they allegorize virtues of the Virgin Mary (citrons for faithfulness, water for purity, and so on—allegory bores me). Certainly, there is a sense of conceptual rigor in the work’s rebuslike presentation, which invests ordinary comestibles on a piece of domestic furniture with the gravitas of a sacrificial altar. I was overwhelmed when I saw the citrons in the picture, many years ago, at the Simon, in Pasadena, California (inch for inch, the finest collection of European paintings west of the Mississippi). Ever since, they have served me as a touchstone of painterly potency. I was pleased to discover, at the Frick, that my mental image of them had been close to photographic. No nuance of the dusky russet shadows and tiny green inflections, in the fruit’s soprano yellow, surprised me. But the other objects registered with a jolt: I didn’t remember any oranges, basket, cup, or rose. My recollection had amputated two-thirds of a tour de force.

That passage is wonderfully memorable. The moment I read it, Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose became a “touchstone of painterly potency” for me, too.