Juan Sanchez Cotan, continued

Continuing from earlier today...

The first English-language mention of Juan Sanchez Cotan about which I know is in Sir William Stirling Maxwell's 1891 "Annals of the Artists of Spain" (the relevant volume of which is free to read or download here). Maxwell doesn't suggest how many Sanchez Cotan oil paintings are extant, but he gives a fine list of paintings and commissions the artist made for other monks and for monasteries. Maxwell also describes this Sanchez Cotan, now at the Prado.

The other American Sanchez Cotan still-life is at the Art Institute of Chicago. With its sweeping diagonal, it's as dramatic as the San Diego painting is subtle.

The AIC painting (above), which is obviously closely related to the San Diego painting, features the same tilted window-ledge-type-space as other Sanchez Cotan still-lifes. I'm hardly a Spanish art scholar, but I don't know of any similar construct in Spanish painting prior to Sanchez Cotan. (Similar spaces surface in later Spanish painting, perhaps most notably in Murillo.)

Finally, the other really terrific thing about the San Diego painting is its op-ish effect. The light source in the painting seems to be somewhere behind the still-life objects, back in the inky blackness. (Maybe the light source is the apple in the upper-left of the painting.) When you stand in front of the painting, it's almost like you can see the protruding cucumber from two different sides. (I can't 'find' it via JPEG.) I think that's because the brain is trying to rationalize the shadows, but maybe it's something else. It all makes for a mesmerizing painting. If you're in Boston the Cotan alone is almost worth the price of admission. (Which is -- gasp -- $23. Or $26.50 if you book online.)

Related: Reader JS suggests an essay by Siri Hustvedt in Mysteries of the Rectangle, which discusses Cotan. You can buy the book here, or if you search on "Cotan" you should be able to read the essay here.