Cultivated Medlar (Mespilus germanica)
1800
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
Artist
Gerard van Spaendonck
Gerard van Spaendonck (1746–1822) was a Dutch artist, born in Tilburg.
See the richer artist page1800
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Cultivated Medlar (Mespilus germanica) is a 1800 by Gerard van Spaendonck, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This painting shows a single medlar fruit with its rough skin and soft inside exposed. The artist used a trick where one printing plate was inked in two colors at once, blending brown and blue-green inks. It looks like someone pressed a rag into the plate first, then added watercolor by hand on the right side. Van Spaendonck worked for French kings before moving to the Netherlands. He loved painting fruit and flowers with almost too-perfect detail. The medlar’s fuzz and split skin feel real enough to touch. This technique is called *à la poupée*. Compare it to Gerard van Spaendonck.
The brown and blue-green inks were printed à la poupée. Instead of making a plate for each color, a single plate is selectively inked in different colors using stumps of rags, known as dolls ( poupée in French), so that the complete design is printed at one time . Since this process is laborious, the plate was most often colored by hand with watercolor, like the right-hand impression. The printed color, however, creates a more beautiful effect, because all of the subtleties of the shading are evident. In comparison, the watercolor camouflages some of the finest detail.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Gerard van Spaendonck (1746–1822) was a Dutch artist, born in Tilburg.
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