For a Sunday Dinner, 1893

  • John Frederick Peto, American, 1854-1907

Oil on canvas

  • Unframed: 30 1/4 × 22 inches (76.8 × 55.9 cm)
  • 36 × 28 3/4 × 2 1/2 inches (91.4 × 73 × 6.4 cm)

Museum Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund

2010.45

Department

American Art before 1950

With luminous color and startling contrast, John Frederick Peto portrayed the sensuous beauty of mundane objects. Suspended by one leg on a string looped over a nail, this plucked fowl seems to emanate a golden glow against the deep green door. The incomplete cruciform of the lifeless body anchors the composition; the taut line from claw to beak divides the canvas into two nearly equal sections, while the rigid leg jutting right draws attention to the emptiness on the left, broken only by the burnished metal keyhole plate and a few floating feathers. The recent death of Peto’s long-time colleague William Hartnett—who painted three versions of a similar subject in the previous decade—may have inspired this work. Whether tribute or not, by emphasizing painterly concerns over tromp l’oeil (fool the eye) illusion, Peto cloaked his straightforward subject in an aura of mystery, making it completely his own. From Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 89 (2015)

Signed and dated, lower left: John F. Peto | 93

by 1907, James Bryant (Island Heights, New Jersey, USA). Howard Keyser, Jr. (Red Bank, New Jersey, USA). by 1953-1977, Howard Keyser (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA). 1977-1979, Hirschl & Adler Galleries (New York, New York, USA). 1979-1992, Midwest Private Collector. 1992-2010, Midwest Corporate Collection. 2010-present, purchase by the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan, USA)

John Frederick Peto, For a Sunday Dinner, 1893, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, 2010.45.