Kiddush Cups (Glasses for the Jewish Museum)

The five glasses depicted in this work are Kiddush cups. A Kiddush cup is a ritual item used to hold wine during the Kiddush blessing. The blessing is said during Shabbat and other Jewish holidays. 

This lithograph print demonstrates how light and shadows filter through glass. To create a lithograph, an artist draws a design on a flat stone or metal plate and then applies chemicals to that surface. Then a piece of paper is pressed onto the surface and the image is transferred from that surface to the paper. This process can be repeated multiple times.

Janet Fish was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1938. Fish is a contemporary realist painter. She aims to paint the world as it actually appears. She studied at the Yale School of Architecture and earned an art degree from Smith College. She grew up in an artistic family and knew from an early age that she wanted to become an artist. 

Fish started out making ceramics and later focused on creating lithographs, screenprints, and still life paintings. A still life is a painting or drawing that shows common objects, like vases or food. Fish’s work depicts the movement of light through water and through clear, everyday objects like glassware. Many of her still life works also depict images of flowers and fruit. 

The real subject is the light, movement, and color and echoes the objects in one’s mind. 

Janet Fish