Wild Game in the Kitchen
Artist
Richard LaBarre Goodwin
(American, 1840 - 1910)
Datec. 1885
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions55 3/4 x 35 3/4 in.
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund
Terms
Object number1958.10
Description“Wild Game in the Kitchen”The fish and game still life came into vogue after the Civil War, perhaps as a reflection of the growth of urban culture, which led to a return to nature-based pursuits and the popularity of masculine activities in a era of gender separation. A number of still-life painters specialized in the genre--William Harnett, Alexander Pope, Jefferson David Chalfant, and George Cope.
A traveler and an outdoorsman, Goodwin painted a great number of game pieces. Of the more than seventy-five works known today, most are depictions of hanging game birds against a bare wall or a cabin door. “Wild Game in the Kitchen”, a variation of the Dutch seventeenth-century kitchen piece, is also typical of both Goodwin's oeuvre and the genre in general. A powder horn and trophies of the hunt hang from a peg against a bare wall. Various household items are arranged, seemingly at random, around the display of wild game. A china platter and a brass pitcher sit on the shelf; a bunch of sage, an aromatic herb used to dress wild game, hangs nearby. The pair of skeleton keys presumably opens the cupboard door, on which hangs a battered copy of the 1822 Farmers' Almanac. Goodwin's birds--a male wood duck, a prairie chicken, and a quail or partridge--fan out from the peg in a pyramid, the base of which is formed by a shallow wall shelf.
While most of Goodwin's canvases are highly repetitious, the New Britain painting has only one other known variation—“Kitchen Piece” (1890; Stanford University Museum). In this work a rabbit, a quail or grouse, and hunting paraphernalia hang against a plaster wall between a big brass ladle and a string of onions; below them is a shelf, similar to that in “Wild Game in the Kitchen”, only this time a candlestick and candle snuffer, a match, and a platter decorated with a medieval landscape lie on the shelf.
Goodwin, like Pope, Chalfant, and Cope, was influenced by Harnett's well-known “After the Hunt” pictures.(1) One of these canvases gained notoriety as "one of the most famous barroom pictures of its time in America" while hanging at Theodore Stewart's New York establishment, the Hoffman House.(2) Harnett painted the series shortly after his return from Europe in 1886, and the subject was widely imitated during the following decade. Some elements of Harnett's work, such as the floating feather, appear in Goodwin's paintings. Goodwin may have been inspired by Harnett, but he was only expanding the possibilities of an already favorite theme, for he had painted dead ducks hanging against plain backgrounds as early as 1880. Moreover, he may have known European treatments of the kitchen piece, especially those by seventeenth-century Dutch artists.(3)
MAS
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Alfred Frankenstein, “After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters”, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 131-35; William H. Gerdts and Russell Burke, “American Still-Life Painting” (New York, Washington, D.C., and London: Praeger Publishers, 1971), pp. 145, 156; William H. Gerdts, “Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939”, exhib. cat. (Columbia, Mo, and London: University of Missouri Press, 1981), pp. 193.
NOTES:
1. Frankenstein, “After the Hunt”, pp.132-33; and Gerdts and Burke, “American Still-Life Painting”, p. 145.
2. Gerdts, Painters of “ Humble Truth”, p. 177.
3. For a recent treatment of this theme, see Scott A. Sullivan, “The Dutch Gamepiece”: Allanheld and Schram, 1984).
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