Cruickshank, William (19th century), Still Life with Dead Goldfinch and Nest

William Cruickshank(19th century). Still Life with a Dead Goldfinch and Nest. Watercolour and gouache on buff paper, 21 x 24.5 cm (visible size), 40 x 42 cm (frame), signed W Cruickshank on the left. Framed behind glass in a passpartout.

- The mystic blue transcends death -

The painting has an atmosphere of melancholy beauty. The clutch of eggs, recalling the wonderfully mysterious blue of Romanticism, the matching blue flowers and the goldfinch with its black, yellow and red plumage show nature in all its beauty, and yet the goldfinch is dead. It lies on its back, its head bent backwards in an unnatural way, its claws lifeless and one wing outstretched in a last effort. This makes the scene a natura morta, a still life that spreads the melancholy silence of an eternal moment. Yet there is also an inherent movement in the picture, enhanced by the streaky application of paint.
A movement that here signifies the intertwining of life and death: death, which the goldfinch has met in mid-life, before it has been able to hatch its offspring, while at the same time the mysterious blue eggs that have not hatched point to a higher life after death. Finally, the goldfinch feeding on the thorny thistles traditionally represents Christ and his redemptive sacrificial death. The goldfinch is depicted in a similar way in Carel Fabritius' famous painting The Thistle Finch (1654), in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The bird is alive, but chained and thus prevented from flying.

In this tradition, Cruickshanks' painting is a memento mori that is immediately appealing to today's viewer - a meditative image of life and death that also contains an affirmation of life in all the beauty of creation. In order to enhance the readability of this pictorial sense, the objects depicted are tilted into the plane so that the individual elements of the picture can be more easily related to one another, but without destroying the sense of space.
Cruickshank, who specialised in this type of painting, combined the emblematics of the Baroque with the imagery of Romanticism and a style borrowed from landscape painting. Cruickshank's mastery of materials is evident in his fusion of watercolour and gouache, in which the more intense colours of gouache concretise the motif from an indeterminate, moving colour space. The painted objects have the aesthetic quality of fine painting, although, as in the case of the nest, they are formed by a virtuoso structure of blotches.

Selected bibliography

Algernon Graves: The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, vol. 2: Carroll to Dyer, London 1905.

Leo R. Schidlof: The miniature in Europe. In the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, vol. 1: A - L, Graz 1964.

Jeremy Maas: Victorian painters, London 1996.

Daphne Foskett: A Dictionary of British miniature painters, London 1972.

Jane Johnson: Works exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists, 1824 - 1893. An Antique Collectors' Club research project, vol. 1: A - P, Woodbridge 1975.

Adrian Vincent: A companion to Victorian and Edwardian artists, Newton 1991.

Selection of public collections holding works by William Cruickshank

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Harris Museum and Art Gallery Preston.