Still Life

Still Life, in art, a composition of inanimate objects such as fruit, flowers, dead game, dishes, books, or musical instruments. This is usually an oil painting but may also be a watercolour, collage, photograph, sculpture, mosaic, or fresco. In French, still life is known as nature morte, in Italian as natura morta, and in German as Stilleben. The Spanish word bodegón applies to scenes set in taverns or kitchens, in which still life is the predominant element. In Dutch, different terms refer to different kinds of still life: for example, ontbijtje (small breakfast pieces), banketje (small banquet pieces), or vanitas, which might contain such objects as skulls, extinguished candles, or watches that serve as moralizing reminders of the transitory nature of life. The simple, unpretentious subject matter of still life is rarely important for its own sake; rather, it represents a vehicle for the painter to exercise skill in composition and the lifelike rendering of detail and texture.

Elements of still life occur in Egyptian tomb paintings, as arrangements of food, game, minerals, or artefacts for the afterlife. Still life seems only to have become an independent subject in Greek wall paintings and mosaics (see Greek Art and Architecture). Although no Greek still life has survived, it is referred to in the works of Roman writers such as Pliny the Elder and Philostratus. In his Natural History, Pliny describes a competition between the Greek painters Parrhasios and Zeuxis in 400 bc to settle the matter of which of the two of them could paint in the most realistic manner. Zeuxis painted grapes so real that birds tried to peck at them. Parrhasios then painted a curtain over a picture that Zeuxis attempted to lift, thus forcing him to concede defeat. Roman still life seems to have evolved from the Greek tradition. The best examples are those, painted in fresco, on the walls of houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum. It takes various forms such as the wall painting known as Peaches and Glass Water Jar (Museo Nazionale, Naples), in which objects are arranged as if on shelves in a cupboard. Roman still life is also known in the form of mosaic, a medium that lent itself well to trompe l’oeil effects; the device of the unswept floor, in which seashells, nutshells, fruit, and discarded scraps of food are depicted as if they had fallen there, is a type of still life known in various instances in Roman art.

With the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity in the 5th century ad, still life virtually disappeared, having no part to play in Christian art, where nothing was to distract the worshipper from Christian narrative scenes. From the 14th century onward, however, coinciding with the revival of interest in Classical antiquity, still life can be found in the details of the fresco cycle illustrating the lives of Christ and the Virgin that Giotto painted in the Arena Chapel, Padua, and in the scenes from the life of the Virgin that his follower, Taddeo Gaddi, painted in Santa Croce, Florence. Manuscript illuminators, such as the Master of Mary of Burgundy, also introduced a powerful illusionistic naturalism into the border illuminations of their manuscripts.

However, it was in the early 15th century, in the panel paintings of such Netherlandish artists as Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck, that still life emerged as an important part of the religious narrative or portrait. It often served a symbolic purpose, as in Robert Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece (c. 1425, Cloisters Museum, New York) or Jan van Eyck’s Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife (1434, National Gallery, London). Here, objects such as an apple, an orange, discarded shoes, or a lighted candle carried a double significance. The technical skill and meticulous realism of Netherlandish masters were greatly admired, and their powers of observation imbued this nascent still life with an increasing importance until, towards the end of the 15th century, it emerged as a subject in its own right.

The earliest still-life subjects were arrangements of skulls or flowers, suggesting a vanitas theme, on the reverse of portraits, as in Marian Flower-Piece (c. 1485, Thyssen Bornemisza Collection, Madrid) by Hans Memling. The development of still life continued in the 16th century with Jacopo de’ Barbari’s Partridge, Gauntlet, and Crossbow Bolt (1504, Munich, Alte Pinakothek), which is sometimes considered to be the first fully fledged still life, and the large displays of fruit and vegetables combined with figures in kitchen interiors by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Bueckelaer. Reproduced as prints, the works of these painters influenced not only Italian painters, among them Vincenzo Campi, Bartolomeo Passarotti, and Caravaggio, but also Spanish artists. For example, the still-life compositions of Velázquez, such as Kitchen Maid and Cook (National Gallery, London), have an intensity and a concern with solid and void that is also characteristic of his contemporaries in Spain, Sanchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurbarán. Cotán’s sparse and highly individual arrangements of brightly lit vegetables, suspended on strings against dark backgrounds, as in Fruit Still Life (c. 1602-1603, Museum of Art, San Diego) continue to find an echo in the simple arrangements of domestic pottery by Zurbarán. More complex arrangements of this type, consisting of nuts, melons, oranges, and wooden boxes, painted in warm oranges and browns, continue in the work of the 18th-century Spanish artist Luis Meléndez. In Italy, meanwhile, early in his career Caravaggio specialized in half-length figures with still-life arrangements, for example, Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593-1594, Borghese Gallery, Rome). His Basket of Fruit (c. 1590-1591, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan) is an independent still life but after 1600 Caravaggio turned exclusively to the painting of religious altarpieces.

During the 17th century, both in the Catholic southern Netherlands and the Protestant Dutch Republic, still life developed in diversity and technical brilliance. Vanitas themes continued to be popular in the work of the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel and later in that of the Dutch painters Herman van Steenwyck and David Bailly. Frans Snyders and Jan Fyt concentrated on hunting trophies, which form the focal point of such works as Fyt’s Dogs with a Still Life of Wild Game (1649, Staatliche Museen, Berlin). These themes remained popular with courtly and noble patrons, not only in the southern Netherlands, but also in France in the work of François Desportes and Jan Baptiste Oudry. By contrast, the more austere climate of the Protestant Dutch Republic contributed to the tonal breakfast pieces of the Dutch painters Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda; here, light invests the characteristic glasses, napkins, and simple food with a gleaming luminosity and atmospheric timelessness, as in Heda’s Breakfast Still Life with Blackberry Pie (1645, Staatliche Sammlung, Dresden).

The Netherlandish specialization of flower painting was introduced to the Dutch Republic by the Flemish immigrant painter Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, whose exquisite Vase of Flowers in a Window (c. 1620, Mauritshuis, The Hague) exemplifies the meticulously observed, symmetrical arrangements characteristic of the early 17th century. The Dutch, keen gardeners, were enthusiastic importers of new plants, and they were also leaders in the science of optics. This led to an increased demand for elaborate displays of flowers of all kinds from all seasons by many painters of high quality, including Balthasar van der Ast and Willem van Aelst, and culminating in the work of Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch. The work of French still-life painters in the early 17th century, such as Lubin Bauguin, Louise Moillon, or Philippe de Champaigne, is characteristically austere, with a few meticulously painted objects starkly arranged against a dark background, as, for example, in Moillon’s Basket with Peaches and Grapes (1631, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe).

Still life found little favour either in Germany or England during the 18th and 19th centuries. In France, however, despite the fact that still life was considered by the French Academy to be the lowest form of art, Jean-Siméon Chardin raised still life to a new status of importance with such sensitive compositions of technical virtuosity as The Buffet (1728, Musée du Louvre, Paris); he became the first still-life painter to be accepted into the French Academy.

In the 18th century, still life in Italy displayed little of the novelty that it had shown in the previous century. The exception, however, was the work of Evaristo Baschenis, from Bergamo, whose smoothly painted arrangements of musical instruments are a satisfying reminder of the importance of northern Italian centres, such as Cremona, in the manufacture of musical instruments. In the United States, meanwhile, influences from France and the Netherlands combined in the work of American artists, particularly in Philadelphia, where Charles Willson Peale, Raphaelle Peale, and William Michael Harnett made a particular contribution to trompe l’oeil in their compositions of objects hanging in front of a wall or cupboard, as, for example, in William Harnett’s Music and Good Luck (1888, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

During the 19th century, in France, the distinction between still life and other subjects was broken down in the work of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and the Impressionist painters Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. Although still life formed a relatively small proportion of their output, they gave it the same status as the other subjects that they painted. Courbet’s still lifes have a powerful solidity, seen for example in Bowl of Apples (1871, National Gallery, London). Manet was impressed by 17th-century Dutch and Spanish painting, which was enjoying a revival during the 19th century, and he painted a number of simple still lifes at the beginning and end of his career. Still Life with Melon and Peaches (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), painted at the beginning of his career, shows him experimenting with paint textures and solid form, while Carnations and Clematis in a Crystal Vase (c. 1882, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), a late work, shows an experienced observation and delicate mastery of light and reflection. Sparkling light effects and the sensuous aspects of colour are explored by Monet and Renoir, as in Monet’s Still Life with Apples and Grapes (1880, Art Institute of Chicago) or Renoir’s Fruit from the South (1881, Art Institute of Chicago). The still lifes of Van Gogh, such as the series of Sunflowers (various collections), glow with a radiant intensity, and the artist’s highly personal Pair of Old Shoes (1888, private collection) is infused with a profound humanity.

By the end of the 19th century, still life came into its own as one of the prime vehicles through which ideas of formal organization and expression in modern art could be explored, first in the work of Cézanne, which led to the aesthetic ideas of the new movements of the early 20th century—for example, Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism. For Cézanne, still life was a means of experimenting with solid structures and with the formal relationships of natural objects to each other and to their surrounding space, seen, for example, in Still Life with Onions (1895-1900, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). His work was an immediate influence upon Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, and his exploration of shapes and appearances was taken up by Picasso and Braque, who transformed dramatically notions of perception. In their still lifes, objects are conceived in geometric terms, with overlapping and merging planes of colour suggesting volume and atmospheric space.

Surrealist painters such as Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí arranged objects in unusual settings and associations, which arouses the subconscious and evokes the intense clarity of unsettling dreams. The 20th century was to see still life firmly established as a fundamental mode of expression in every aspect of contemporary art, not only in painting but in a great variety of materials, from bronze and marble to plastic and “found” objects.