Hvid champignon 1913

Peter Ilsted made this etching, ‘Hvid champignon’, a still life of mushrooms, sometime between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m thinking about how he composed it, and why he chose to only use a warm palette of browns, tans, and creams. It looks like a tonal exercise, kind of like a game. The smooth caps are placed at different angles as though he arranged them with an idea to capture the different ways light can describe an object. There’s one small, round mushroom on its side that’s reflecting the light in such a lovely way, I can almost feel its smooth surface. I bet Ilsted delighted in exploring the variety of luminous effects he could produce. And I love that the backdrop isn’t just a flat tone, but full of subtle activity. Like, he’s suggesting the space keeps going, that the mushrooms aren’t isolated, but part of an environment, even if it’s an imagined one. It gives it a contemporary feel, like Manet.