Elena Recco (late 17th And Early 18th Centuries), Still Life With Fish

Elena Recco (Active between the late 17th and early 18th centuries)

Still Life with Fish

Oil on canvas, 48 x 62 cm

With frame: 60 x 74 cm

The daughter and student of Giuseppe, Elena Recco successfully ventured into still life, drawing on her father’s themes and favoring marine subjects in particular. No precise details are known about her career; Bernardo de’ Dominici (1683–1759), in his “Vite de’ pittori, scultori, ed architetti napoletani” (III, Naples 1742–44, p. 297), in the appendix to the biography of Giuseppe Recco, provides some details. The biographer mentions Elena’s move to Spain and her presence in Madrid in 1695, in the retinue of the Countess of Santo Stefano, who had relocated there upon the conclusion of her husband’s term as Viceroy of Naples. We do not know how long her stay in the Spanish capital lasted, but she produced several works there, as documented in a 1794 inventory of the Buen Retiro Palace, which lists several canvases with floral subjects attributed to her.

The painting analyzed here constitutes an interesting example to be considered alongside Elena Recco’s finest and most characteristic works, as highlighted in the book *Still Lifes of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries* (edited by Patrizia Consigli Valente, Parma, 1987, pp. 10–11). The arrangement of the fish in the foreground, through a rich composition, is found in some of her most successful works. The composition under analysis fully embodies the distinctive characteristics of Recco’s work: the surface on which the catch is displayed is bathed in a subdued yet diffused light emanating from the landscape behind. The fish in the foreground exhibit the distinctive features of her works: the distinctive pink, greenish, and blue-gray hues of the scales, combined with the sparkling vitality of the freshly caught prey, which glisten with silvery reflections, revealing their liveliness—expressed through the brilliance of their large, wide-open eyes and the writhing of their bodies.