William Harnett “Still Life with Lobster, Fruit, Champagne and Newspaper” 1882. 

In which the lobster is an inverse odalisque. The lobster of still-life painting is a red humped figure, claws slouching across a white napkin or tablecloth, perhaps arranged primly upon a pale porcelain or silver platter. Here, Harnett’s lobster plops upon the day’s paper. As part of the true centerpiece, the napkin replaces the pale flesh of the Venus upon which the dreams of the painter and viewer are written (like an opinion column). The lobster as model is protected, a shell becoming the couch to protect itself with the veneer of civilization. Remove the shell, the couch, remove the red and it becomes animal again, alive and powerful, claw swinging in the darkness, armed and probing sensitively through the muck for eons. As a centerpiece, a surivivor reduced and compromised.