Nature morte aux asperges

By 1867, painting a bundle of asparagus and nothing else was a quiet act of conviction. The Realists around Courbet and the critic Champfleury had spent the decade arguing that ordinary things — a kitchen table, a cheap meal — deserved the same serious attention painters once saved for saints and battles. Bonvin belonged to that circle, and he loved the 18th-century painter Chardin, who had treated humble kitchen objects with exactly that gravity. So here the asparagus lies on a plain surface in even light, described with care rather than flourish, its cut ends and pale stalks given their full weight. It is the kind of subject the age was learning to take seriously. Manet would paint his own famous bundle of asparagus only 13 years later, in 1880.