三片鲑鱼静物

Goya painted this in a Madrid under French occupation. The dozen or so still lifes he made between 1808 and 1812 were not commissions. They stayed in his own house, and they appear in the inventory drawn up in 1812 after his wife Josefa died, each marked with an X and a number when the estate was divided. Those same years brought the famine that killed something like 20,000 people in the city, and they are the years he was etching the Disasters of War. Three cuts of salmon lie on a bare surface, the raw flesh lit hard against a dark ground, with nothing else in the picture at all. It hangs now above Winterthur in Switzerland, in the house of Oskar Reinhart, who bought it from a Paris dealer.