still life

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In painting and other visual arts, a depiction of inanimate objects, such as flowers, fruit, or tableware. Still-life painting was popular among the ancient Greeks and Romans (who also made still-life mosaics), but thereafter it was sidelined in European art for centuries, as art was overwhelmingly devoted to religious subjects during the Middle Ages. It reappeared during the Renaissance and became established as a distinctive branch of painting in the 17th century, flourishing first in the Netherlands, where the Reformation had discouraged religious imagery and artists were seeking new subjects. Pictures of dead animals are also covered by the term.

Early examples often combine a delight in the appearance of things with religious or moral symbolism. Flowers, for example, can always refer to the frailty and brief span of human life, because flowers quickly fade and die. In the same vein, a vanitas (Latin for ‘emptiness’ or ‘worthlessness’) is a particular type of still life consisting entirely of objects stressing the shortness of life: a skull, a candle, flower petals, and so on. In spite of the popularity of such symbolism, in the history of art still life was regarded as the lowest branch of painting for centuries, requiring only the skill of copying rather than creative imagination. This attitude was common until the 19th century, when people began to be more interested in how a picture was painted than what it represented, and since then many great artists have devoted a good deal of time to still life, which enabled them to concentrate on formal problems. Paul Cézanne for example was particularly suited to still life as he was a very slow worker, and it was also the favourite subject of the cubists.

The Low Countries
Generally speaking, still life was little cultivated in Italy, and in the 17th century was largely a speciality of Dutch and Flemish artists. The Dutch interest in floriculture helped to create a demand for minutely detailed and accurately coloured flower pictures, as in the work of Jan Davidz van Heem, Rachel Ruysch, and Jan van Huysum. Arrangements of food vessels on a table allowed Dutch painters to show their skill in reproducing realistic representations of various materials and textures, while reminding patrons of convivial meals; Willem Claesz Heda and Willem Kalf, for example, excelled at this subject. Flemish artists such as Jan Brueghel and Frans Snyders produced paintings that captured all the richness and splendour of a wealthy lifestyle.

Spain
Spanish artists also showed an intense appreciation of material substance, exemplified by the bodegones (kitchen still lifes) of Velázquez. Francisco de Zurbarán painted some magnificently severe still lifes that have an aura of solemn religious intensity, and Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) was an outstanding still-life specialist in the 18th century.

France
A taste for Flemish and Dutch still life in 18th-century France encouraged Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin to produce his masterpieces of the genre. Still life was much cultivated by the great artists of 19th-century France, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Pierre-August Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh providing great examples, though the objects themselves became increasingly unimportant for these artists, as their interest in still life was motivated more by the study of light and colour. Cubism carried this process a stage further in breaking through surface appearance, though the cubist still life retains a suggestion of familiar things. Although a still life can tend towards abstract art, it stops short of complete abstraction.

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