Oil painting, 'Interior with Figures and Still Life', Benjamin Blake, 1826

Bequeathed by Richard Blake

Bequeathed by Richard Blake, 1910.
A label on the back indicates that Richard Blake, the artist's son, bought the picture from Alfred Gritten of 9 King Street, St James's, London, 24 June 1853 for £31.

Historical Significance: This painting, in which is depicted a variety of dead game, reflects Blake’s contact with the Dutch still life genre, which he is known to have successfully copied as part of his career. Still life, although already present in Classical art, reached the peak of its popularity in the seventeenth-century, most specifically in the Netherlands. The term, derived from the Dutch ‘stilleven’, conventionally refers to the depiction of an arrangement of inanimate objects, including fruit, flowers, musical instruments and artefacts. Often infused with symbolic meaning, working as memento mori or vanitas, reminders of human mortality, later still life paintings also come to reflect the growing wealth and prosperity of cities such as Amsterdam and Haarlem. Frans Snyders’ (1579-1657) market and kitchen scenes, into which are built elaborate still life motifs, with an abundance of dead game and fish, exemplifies this new-found affluence and the development of still life featuring food in Flanders and the Netherlands. Already popular within the new bourgeois market of its day, Dutch master paintings were still greatly sought after in the nineteenth-century; a market to which Blake catered for in his copying of old Dutch paintings, which no doubt greatly influenced his depiction of still life in this painting in the V&A collection.

Despite the abundance of dead game, the cottage setting and figures appear to feature more prominently than the backdrops in earlier still life paintings. This may be seen as reflecting the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century’s renewed interest in depictions of low life, exemplified in the work of David Wilkie (1785-1841) and George Morland (1763-1804). Genre painting, portraying most especially the lower classes of society, depicts scenes from everyday life. Set in domestic interiors or in the countryside, they came to be associated with health and pleasure. The seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of genre painting was especially influential during the new vogue which sought to represent a romanticized and vigorous image of rural life. The present picture reflects this rustic vogue, with its seemingly peaceful cottage interior and lively figures, and draws on works such as Willem van Mieris’ (1662-1747) A Woman and a Fish-pedlar in a Kitchen, now in the National Gallery, London, where genre painting gives a still life motif as larger backdrop, in which the figures interact, hinting at an implied narrative setting.

References:

Bénézit, E., Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, (Librairie Gründ, 1948), Tome 1, p.685.

Blake, Richard, Correspondence
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Grant, Colonel Maurice Harold, A Dictionary of British Landscape Painters, (F.Lewis Ltd, Leigh-on-Sea, 1st publ. 1952, repr. 1970), pp.23-4.

Graves, Algernon, A Dictionary of Artists, 1760 to 1880, (George Bell & Sons, 1884).

Graves, Algernon, The Royal Academy of Arts, Dictionary of Contributors in 1769 to 1904, (Henry Graves & Co, and George Bell & Sons, 1905), vol. 1.

Vaughan, William, British painting: The Golden Age from Hogarth to Turner, (Thames and Hudson, London, 1999)

P.6-1910