Vital Fish in Utrecht
As part of its VIS VITALIS project the Centraal Museum in Utrecht is hosting an exhibition of Fish Still Lifes by Dutch and Flemish Masters from 1550-1700. It focuses on a genre which has long remained in undeserved obscurity. Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder have provided a major contribution to the show in the shape of eight paintings. In all the presentation will feature 55 works.
The 2003 Erasmus Prize was awarded to the Scottish author Alan Davidson for his Oxford Companion to Food. Various Dutch museums seized the opportunity to make it a year of culinary culture. Did you join the seven queens at table in Het Loo
Palace or did you prefer the company of regents at Frans Hals Museum? If neither were to your taste then you can still make it to the Centraal Museum in Utrecht for some fish.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is certainly worth acquiring: not only does it explore the role of fish in the culinary world, it also for the first time examines fish still lifes as a theme in art. After centuries of relative neglect the genre
and its artists can now take their rightful place alongside their seventeenth-century colleagues. Fred Meijer, still-life specialist at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague helps bring these artists into the limelight. While Eddy
De Jongh unravels the idiom and meaning of fish still lifes.
Fish Still Lifes by Dutch and Flemish Masters 1550-1700, Stables at Centraal Museum Utrecht, 7 February - 9 May 2004