The game larder
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Britain
08 February 1802 – 06 January 1885
The game larder
c 1830
oil on board
- Place made
- Norwich, England
- Medium
- oil on board
- Dimensions
- 50.5 x 40.5 cm
- Credit line
- Gift of Professor Ida Llewellyn-Smith through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 20th Anniversary Collectors Club 2020
- Accession number
- 20213P42
- Signature and date
- signed lower right: 'E Stannard'
- Provenance
- LR Nightingale, Paston House, Elm Hill Norwich (collector’s label); Professor Sir Albert Richardson; (Christie’s London 19 September 2013, lot 483); Mr John Schaeffer; (Leonard Joel August 2020, lot 435); acquired 2021 by AGSA;
- Media category
- Painting
- Collection area
- British paintings
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This intricately detailed still life painting of caught game demonstrates the artist's significant skill in portraying the natural world. Every feather is finely worked on the suspended bodies of the Mallard duck and drake, while the delicate rendering of the fur on the lifeless body of the hare is such that we can almost feel the softness of the fur. Stannard also employs chiaroscuro - light and shade - to great effect, focusing our attention on the highly realistic and lovingly portrayed creatures, while the darker and more impressionistic background recedes from our gaze.
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Considered one of the finest nineteenth century painters of the still life genre, Emily Stannard was associated with the Norwich School of Painters. Born in Norwich in 1802 Stannard came form a talented artistic family with both parents being accomplishe amateur artisrts. Unusually for a woman in the early nineteenth century, Stannard was encouraged to pursue her artistic passion.
In 1820 she travelled to The Netherlands with her father where she studied the masters of the Dutch Golden Age celebrated for their still life and vanitas paintings. Stannard began exhibiting with the Norwich Society of Artists in 1816, an organisation whcih her father had assisted in founding in 1803. The Society awarded her three gold medals over the course of her career.