Still Life with Cheese

Still Life with Cheese is among Vollon's most tightly observed kitchen subjects — a wheel or wedge of aged cheese presented with the same investigative intensity Chardin had applied to the copper pot or the clay pipe. Vollon's enthusiasm for cheese as a still-life subject was unusual even among specialists in the genre, and his multiple cheese paintings carry a quasi-scientific interest in the physical properties of different aged cheeses — their crusts, their internal textures, the way light differentiates hard rind from crumbling interior.

Vollon's cheese is rendered in a warm ochre-yellow palette with careful differentiation of rind texture and interior cut surface. The brushwork is varied: smooth broad strokes for the flat cut face, broken, dragged marks for the rougher exterior rind. A dark ground gives the object a warm chiaroscuro that recalls Dutch seventeenth-century cheese still lifes.