Taking its title from an 1873 Camille Pissarro painting once seen as ‘vulgar’ for foregrounding the lowly cabbage plant, Cabbage Field imbues moments of everyday urban life with an auratic stillness.

While trying to abandon any metaphysical subject and adhere to the realist tradition—by portraying ordinary scenes without mediation—Rossetti was nevertheless led astray. His attempts at realist representation here are disrupted by mundane fabrications. The characters that populate his paintings, those dear to him, gaze past one another, isolated despite their physical proximity. The result is a mirror-like world where intentions are shaped by impulse and desire.

Rossetti’s pursuit of representation lies not in the veracity of his painting, but in the verity of its subject. Whether leather shoes, common vegetables, or a raw piece of meat, ordinary marks of realism become signs themselves; some hazardous, unnerving. This mimesis is the simulation of inexpressible impulses, and not a faithful depiction of the visible world. The works on view endure as solecisms—painterly gestures that unravel their conceptual premise. Despite its semblance of everyday realism, Cabbage Field exposes the ongoing tension between a present rife with disenchantment and, by implicating the artist’s contemporaries, the earnest and winding paths of friendship.

Download press release