''Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose'' is an oil-on-canvas painting by

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán completed in 1633. It is currently displayed at the Norton Simon Museum in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial district. I ...

as part of its permanent collection. It is the only

still life A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, m ...

signed and dated by him and is considered a masterwork of the genre.

Composition and analysis

The painting shows three groups of objects (a saucer of four citrons, a basket of oranges, and a saucer holding both a cup of water and a rose) resting on a table against a dark background. Each group of objects are placed equidistant from one another and form a spatial and geometrical balance due to their pyramidal organization. As described by Andreas Prater: Norman Bryson writes: Many of Zurbaran's works contained Christian themes, and the objects in the painting are often interpreted as having symbolic meaning as alluding to the

Holy Trinity The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (, from 'threefold') is the central dogma concerning the nature of God in most Christian churches, which defines one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the F ...

or as an homage to the Virgin Mary.

Morten Lauridsen Morten Johannes Lauridsen (born February 27, 1943) is an American composer. A National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1994 to 2001, and is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of ...

wrote in the ''Wall Street Journal'': Lauridsen has cited the painting as a major inspiration for his 1994 choral setting of ''

O magnum mysterium O magnum mysterium is a responsorial chant from the Matins of Christmas. Text The text is drawn from the Matins of Christmas in the Roman Breviary. ; Latin text: : O magnum mysterium, : et admirabile sacramentum, : ut animalia viderent Do ...

''.

References

{{Francisco de Zurbarán Paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán 1633 paintings Paintings in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum Still life paintings