Still life with chalice and plate.

Lovis Corinth was one of the major German painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, combining academic training with a robust, sensual realism that retained connections to the Flemish Baroque tradition. This 1901 still life with chalice and plate belongs to the tradition of ecclesiastical still life — objects associated with the liturgy painted outside their devotional context — that reaches back to Zurbarán and the Spanish Golden Age. Corinth's treatment is characteristically unspiritual, presenting the objects as physical matter rather than sacred vessels. The painting is held at the National Museum in Warsaw.

The chalice and plate are painted with Corinth's characteristic bravura: confident impasto, strong lighting from one side, and a palette of deep warm tones that gives the metal surfaces convincing weight and lustre. Brushwork is direct and energetic rather than labored.