Janet Fish (Boston, 1938 – Wells, Vermont, 2025) was an American realist painter, credited with revitalizing the still life genre in contemporary art. She worked mainly in oil, and also in lithography and screenprinting, exploring how light passes through and reflects off everyday objects.
Raised in Bermuda in a family full of artists, she studied at Smith College and at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where she moved from sculpture to painting. There she turned away from the Abstract Expressionism taught by her instructors, which she felt was a set of rules that did not speak to her. In 1963 she became one of the first women to earn a Master of Fine Arts from Yale.
Her canvases show jars, glasses of water, cellophane wrappers and teacups, built from transparency, reflections and overlapping patterns in saturated colour. Critics linked her to Photorealism, but she did not regard herself as a photorealist, and her choices of composition and colour reflect a painter's eye. She exhibited more than seventy-five times in the United States and abroad.
Her legacy lies in giving new standing to a genre once considered minor. Critics credited her with reviving still life, and the painter Eric Fischl said that anyone working with domestic still life has to reckon with her work.