Art, literature & historyStill Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument
1938
- Dating
- Exact year
- Held at
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Medium
- Oil and sand on canvas
- Dimensions
- 114.3 × 145.5 cm (45 × 58 in.)
- Collection no.
- 1988.141.6
- Attribution
- By the artist
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
About this artwork
Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument — Georges Braque. 1938.
Medium: Oil and sand on canvas. Dimensions: 114.3 × 145.5 cm (45 × 58 in.).
Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
Among Georges Braque’s largest and most ambitious still lifes of the 1930s, Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument features complex ornamentation and over-lapping, visually playful patterns that create rhythmic movement. An example of what Braque called “rhyming shapes” and “metamorphic confusion,” the round fruits on the table mimic the holes of stringed instruments, and the curving lines of the mandolin evoke a fruit bowl. “Echo answers to echo,” Braque once said, “everything reverberates”—even the work’s surface, which he enlivened with coarse sand.
Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.