Still Life with Eggs

Claude Monet's Still Life with Eggs (Nature morte aux œufs) is dated 1907, the years when Monet was otherwise absorbed in painting his water-lily pond. It shows a corner of a table spread with a white cloth: a wicker basket of eggs, a few loose eggs on a crumpled napkin, a glass carafe and a white bowl, against a dark green background. It is in a private collection, and it is one of the very last still lifes Monet is known to have painted.

What you are looking at

The table takes up most of the canvas, seen from slightly above. Its cloth is painted in pale pinks, creams, lilacs and grays, with long, soft folds running toward the lower right, where it hangs over the edge. The light seems to come from the left and front, catching the cloth and leaving the far edge of the table in shadow.

Near the center sits a shallow wicker basket, painted in warm, pale ocher, filled with eggs in white, cream and pinkish brown. In front of it, a white napkin is bunched up, its folds tumbling toward the viewer, and three loose eggs lie on the cloth beside it. At left, a squat glass carafe or jar stands at the back of the table, a transparent shape built of pale blue and gray reflections. In front of it is a round white bowl, filled with something pale, perhaps milk, flour or sugar.

Behind the table, a band of very dark green fills the top of the picture, setting off the pale objects. There is little contrast elsewhere: the eggs, cloth, napkin and bowl are all whites of slightly different temperatures.

A picture about whites

The real subject is the many kinds of white. Monet had loved painting white objects since the 1860s, from snow to linen to chalk cliffs, and here he plays the warm white of the eggs against the cool white of the napkin and the pinkish white of the cloth. The glass carafe adds a different kind of pale, a white made of reflections. The dark green ground is there to make all these pale tones glow.

Monet and still life

Still life was never central for Monet, but he painted it seriously in the 1860s and again in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when flower and fruit pieces sold more easily than landscapes. After the mid-1880s he almost abandoned it, which makes a canvas from 1907 unusual. By then he was working on the series of Water Lilies that he would exhibit at Durand-Ruel in 1909, such as the 1907 Water Lilies now in the Pola Museum of Art. The still life shares their soft, close-valued palette and loose handling, even though its subject is so different.

For his earlier work in the genre, compare Still Life with Meat of 1864 and the fruit pieces such as Still Life with Pears and Grapes.

How it was painted

The paint is soft and loosely brushed, with forms built of broad strokes rather than outlines. The eggs are simple ovals with a highlight and a soft shadow; the napkin is a few twisting strokes of white and gray; the glass is little more than a pattern of pale reflections. The signature is at lower left. The handling recalls the late Water Lilies more than his crisp still lifes of the 1880s.

For Monet's life and work at Giverny, where this table almost certainly stood, see Giverny: Monet's House and Garden.

Where to see it

The painting is in a private collection and is rarely exhibited. For Monet's work on public view, see Where to See Monet's Paintings; for the artist, Claude Monet.