Antoine Vollon, Mound of Butter (1875–85)
There’s something at once intensely reverent and matter-of-fact about Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter. Its yellowness could not be more sumptuous, and the white cloth around the bottom seems to evanesce in front of a viewer’s eyes. As Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee wrote about it in an appreciation: “In a kind of alchemical voodoo, Vollon has pushed—you almost want to say smeared—the illusionism we associate with great art into new territory, like a visual version of onomatopoeia.”
