Twelve paintings in which a fish or a sea creature carries the picture, from Chardin's The Ray, a gutted skate grinning in a kitchen, to Turner's Slave Ship, where fish swarm around a chained leg.
A fish can mean a market stall, a miracle or a crime at sea. For many painters, it is above all a problem of paint: how to keep the shine of a creature that loses it soon after leaving the water.
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How These Were Chosen
A fresh fish is hard to paint well. A painter who wants wet scales on canvas has to work fast or fake the shine convincingly.
Sea creatures can bring something more, which is danger at sea. A shark or a monster from the deep puts a threat into the picture, and a threat calls for a victim, a hero or a rescue. Natural history, the careful description of a species, is rarely the point.
The choice follows one simple rule. In each painting, the animal matters to what the picture says or to the way it was painted, and taking it out would change the work. Pictures where a few fish only fill a corner of the background were left out.
12. Fish Market
In Fish Market, painted in 1568 by the Antwerp painter Joachim Beuckelaer, an old fishmonger stands over a table crowded with salmon, cod, carp, herring and a pike. He lifts his knife above a salmon, but his eyes are somewhere else.
They rest on a woman in her middle years across the table. She answers his look with nothing at all. His look is a flirtation, and she refuses it. Her hands stay crossed over a small vessel, a gesture that closes the conversation before it starts.
Beuckelaer specialized in market and kitchen scenes, crowded tables of food with a few people around them. Here the other customers go on chatting at the back and never notice the little drama at the stall.
While the fishmonger looks away from his merchandise, the painter gives the fish his full attention. On the pike, Beuckelaer laid the scales in thick dabs of paint and scratched lines through them, so that the skin seems to catch the light.
At a Glance
Artist: Joachim Beuckelaer
Painted: 1568
Medium: Oil on Baltic oak panel
Size: 128.6 × 174.9 cm (50.6 × 68.9 in)
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
11. Fish (Still Life)
Édouard Manet was already notorious in Paris when he painted Fish (Still Life) in 1864. The year before, his Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a picnic where a naked woman sits between two dressed men, had caused a scandal.
His still life is built around a single carp. The other fish and the vegetables run in a slanting line across the table, and the carp lies crosswise to that slope, which keeps the whole table steady.
A table of fish was an old subject, painted again and again for more than two centuries before Manet's Fish (Still Life). He still found something in it to change.