Detail of Fish Market by Beuckelaer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2020

Fish Market
1568

Object Details

Title: Fish Market

Artist: Joachim Beuckelaer (Netherlandish, Antwerp 1533–1575 Antwerp)

Date: 1568

Medium: Oil on Baltic oak

Dimensions: 50 5/8 × 68 7/8 in. (128.6 × 174.9 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift and Bequest of George Blumenthal, by exchange, 2015

Accession Number: 2015.146

Signed and dated 1568, this masterfully composed view of a daily fish market represents the new genre of still-life painting, initiated by Joachim Beuckelaer and his teacher, Pieter Aertsen, who lived and worked in Antwerp. It was painted during the tumultuous times of the Iconoclasm (1566), which disrupted the art market and motivated a change from purely religious to more secular themes. Here the flourishing fish industry is celebrated through the display of the great bounty from the sea. Such pictures also increasingly embraced a moralizing subtext, warning against the excesses of food and sexual pleasures.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/679844