Antoine Vollon

In the Paris of the 1870s, still life sat near the bottom of the ladder of respectable painting, below history scenes, portraits, even landscape. Antoine Vollon spent his career quietly proving that ranking wrong. The son of a Lyon craftsman, he trained first as a metal engraver, and when he reached Paris in 1859 he fell in with Théodule Ribot, a painter devoted to the dark, plain kitchen scenes of the old Dutch and Spanish masters.

What Vollon could do with an ordinary subject shows in his best-known work, the Mound of Butter, painted around 1875. It is exactly that: a heap of fresh butter on a cloth, a wooden spatula pushed into it, two eggs alongside. He laid the paint on as thickly as the butter itself, so the surface looks soft, cold, and about to slump. Critics of his day called him the Chardin of the 19th century, after Jean-Siméon Chardin, the 18th-century master of humble kitchen things.

The honours kept pace with the reputation. Vollon won Salon medals in the 1860s, was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1870, and in 1897, three years before his death, was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Mound of Butter now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it has quietly become one of the paintings visitors ask a guard to point them toward.