Market Woman with Fruit, Vegetables and Poultry

Description

Warm ochre and rust sit against cool cabbage green and the pale gold of melon rind, and the fight between them carries the whole canvas. A dull red comb on a hanging bird answers the copper glint of a basket weave. Nothing in this arrangement is quiet, yet the woman at the center holds still against it, her skin tone a calm, muted note that lets the produce around her shout.

About Market Woman with Fruit, Vegetables and Poultry

Market Woman with Fruit, Vegetables and Poultry belongs to the genre Beuckelaer helped invent: the market scene as a subject serious enough for oil paint, not a background detail to a religious or mythological scene. The stall fills nearly the whole picture plane, cabbages and melons stacked with the same care a court painter might give to drapery, plucked fowl hanging in rows with their feathers rendered feather by feather. The vendor herself looks out with a level, unbothered gaze, one hand resting near the goods as though she has been standing there for an hour and will stand there for another.

This attention to surface, the sheen of a melon, the coarse weave of a basket, the slight give of feather against skin, shows a painter working at the height of his control over texture. The picture belongs to the period when Antwerp painters were turning food and commerce into their own kind of grand subject, and Beuckelaer, more than most, made the ordinary market stall worth a long look.

A hand-painted oil painting reproduction of this work is built the same way the original was, layer by layer in oil on canvas, by a trained painter matching the same warm earth tones and the same cool green accents stroke for stroke. The brushwork stays visible. The surface keeps its texture. This is a painted object, a fine art reproduction made by hand, not a print run off a machine.

The hand-painted reproduction

Four centuries on, the picture still holds attention because it refuses to look past its own subject matter. It asks you to look at cabbages and feathers as though they mattered, and somehow they do. Owning a painted version of that argument, worked in the same medium the artist used, keeps the argument alive on your own wall rather than behind glass in a book.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, brushwork and surface texture preserved
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation, ready to hang
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days