Still Life with Sheep
- Artist: Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky
- Date: 1938
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 400 x 805 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the "Still Life with Sheep" by Marie‑Louise Von Motesiczky. Painted in 1938, the oil on canvas was created in a small hotel in Amsterdam, after the artist and her mother fled Vienna when the Nazis annexed Austria. With only an ironing board at hand, she set up a still life that mirrors the shape of the board, giving the work its oblong outline.
In front of a white cloth she placed two eighteenth‑century Chinese sheep ornaments—her only tangible souvenirs from Vienna—together with bright blue grapes, a yellow grapefruit, flowers, a yellow curtain, and patterned wallpaper behind. The colors are vivid and the brushwork combines thin washes with subtle impasto highlights.
Von Motesiczky said she painted to create something beautiful and to dream. The piece is a quiet, personal snapshot of resilience and the power of familiar objects in a new, uncertain place.
See it in person
Still Life with Sheep is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
