French school; 1921.

French school; 1921.
Untitled.
Oil on canvas.
Presents restorations on the pictorial surface.
Signed "M.A. Colmbie" and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 60 x 80 cm.
This still life is inscribed in the French tradition of the still life cultivated since the XVII century, but updated in the context of the aesthetic transformations of the beginning of the XX century. The composition brings together carefully arranged objects; a violin, an open book with sheet music, a fan, a lamp and a vase with flowers, on a red cloth that intensifies the theatricality of the whole. The lateral illumination and the meticulous detailing reveal an illusionist will that dialogues with the academic heritage, while a modern sensibility is perceived in the chromatic vibration and in the material richness of the brushstroke.
The work shows a subtle influence of orientalism, visible in the presence of the fan and the vase decorated with motifs that evoke Asian aesthetics, as well as in the taste for the exotic and the ornamental. This interest in objects of oriental origin or inspiration was frequent in nineteenth-century European painting and survived into the first decades of the twentieth century, when exoticism continued to feed visual imaginaries linked to symbolism and fin-de-siècle decorativism.