The French Fan

Emil Carlsen painted still life with a quietness that took decades to find an audience. A copper pot, a few fish, plain cloth, and a great deal of carefully judged empty space. Chardin was the obvious model and Carlsen never denied it. He trained as an architect in Copenhagen before emigrating to Chicago at nineteen, and spent years teaching and struggling financially, including a period in Paris where he worked in near poverty studying the French still life tradition. Recognition arrived in his forties and fifties. He also painted marines and landscapes in Connecticut, looser and more atmospheric than the still lifes. What connects both is restraint: nothing raised in pitch, nothing added for effect, surfaces built up slowly in thin layers.