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97-515: A still life is a work of art depicting inanimate subject matter. Still Life , The Still Life , or Still Lives may also refer to: Still life With origins in the Middle Ages and Ancient Greco-Roman art, still-life painting emerged as a distinct genre and professional specialization in Western painting by the late 16th century, and has remained significant since then. One advantage of

194-533: A bodegón is a still-life painting depicting pantry items, such as victuals, game, and drink, often arranged on a simple stone slab, and also a painting with one or more figures, but significant still-life elements, typically set in a kitchen or tavern. Starting in the Baroque period, such paintings became popular in Spain in the second quarter of the 17th century. The tradition of still-life painting appears to have started and

291-556: A Stand by Gustave Caillebotte , a painting which was mocked at the time as a "display of fruit in a bird's-eye view." Vincent van Gogh 's "Sunflowers" paintings are some of the best-known 19th-century still-life paintings. Van Gogh uses mostly tones of yellow and rather flat rendering to make a memorable contribution to still-life history. His Still Life with Drawing Board (1889) is a self-portrait in still-life form, with Van Gogh depicting many items of his personal life, including his pipe, simple food (onions), an inspirational book, and

388-571: A bountiful spread of vegetables, fruit and/or meat, with small religious scenes in spaces in the background. Around the same time, Pieter Brueghel the Elder made peasants and their activities, very naturalistically treated, the subject of many of his paintings. Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade , Jan Steen , Adriaen Brouwer , David Teniers , Joos van Craesbeeck , Gillis van Tilborgh , Aelbert Cuyp , Willem van Herp , David Ryckaert III . Jacob Jordaens , Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch were among

485-404: A bride and groom visiting a goldsmith is a typical example of a transitional still life depicting both religious and secular content. Though mostly allegorical in message, the figures of the couple are realistic and the objects shown (coins, vessels, etc.) are accurately painted but the goldsmith is actually a depiction of St. Eligius and the objects heavily symbolic. Another similar type of painting

582-676: A contrast. One change was a new enthusiasm among French painters, who now form a large proportion of the most notable artists, while the English remained content to import. Jean-Baptiste Chardin painted small and simple assemblies of food and objects in a most subtle style that both built on the Dutch Golden Age masters, and was to be very influential on 19th-century compositions. Dead game subjects continued to be popular, especially for hunting lodges; most specialists also painted live animal subjects. Jean-Baptiste Oudry combined superb renderings of

679-549: A diversity of objects, fruits, flowers and dead game, often together with living people and animals. The style was soon adopted by artists from the Dutch Republic . Especially popular in this period were vanitas paintings, in which sumptuous arrangements of fruit and flowers, books, statuettes, vases, coins, jewelry, paintings, musical and scientific instruments, military insignia, fine silver and crystal, were accompanied by symbolic reminders of life's impermanence. Additionally,

776-502: A few objects of food and tableware laid on a table. Still-life painting in Spain, also called bodegones , was austere. It differed from Dutch still life, which often contained rich banquets surrounded by ornate and luxurious items of fabric or glass. The game in Spanish paintings is often plain dead animals still waiting to be skinned. The fruits and vegetables are uncooked. The backgrounds are bleak or plain wood geometric blocks, often creating

873-467: A genre work even if it could be shown that the artist had used a known person—a member of his family, say—as a model. In this case it would depend on whether the work was likely to have been intended by the artist to be perceived as a portrait—sometimes a subjective question. The depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proven popular with

970-725: A given profession, as with the Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrecht's painting "Painter's Easel with Fruit Piece", which displays all the tools of a painter's craft. Also popular in the first half of the 17th century was the painting of a large assortment of specimens in allegorical form, such as the "five senses", "four continents", or "the four seasons", showing a goddess or allegorical figure surrounded by appropriate natural and human-made objects. The popularity of vanitas paintings, and these other forms of still life, soon spread from Holland to Flanders and Germany, and also to Spain and France. The Netherlandish production of still lifes

1067-499: A letter from his brother, all laid out on his table, without his own image present. He also painted his own version of a vanitas painting Still Life with Open Bible, Candle, and Book (1885). In the United States during Revolutionary times, American artists trained abroad applied European styles to American portrait painting and still life. Charles Willson Peale founded a family of prominent American painters, and as major leader in

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1164-699: A major work by the French painter Gustave Courbet , After Dinner at Ornans (1849). Famous Russian realist painters like Vasily Perov and Ilya Repin also produced genre paintings. In Germany, Carl Spitzweg (1808–85) specialized in gently humorous genre scenes, and in Italy Gerolamo Induno (1825–90) painted scenes of military life. Subsequently, the Impressionists , as well as such 20th-century artists as Pierre Bonnard , Itshak Holtz , Edward Hopper , and David Park painted scenes of daily life. But in

1261-544: A merry family evening with the head of the family, clearly inebriated, singing out his lungs, backed up by the mother and grandmother. The children join in on musical instruments. The moral of the picture is clarified in the note hanging from the mantelpiece reading "So de ouden songen, so pijpen de jongen" ("As the Old Sing, So the Young Pipe"), i.e. children will learn their behaviour from their parents. Jacob Jordaens had painted

1358-525: A moral theme or a religious scene in the background in the first half of the 16th century. These were part of a pattern of " Mannerist inversion" in Antwerp painting, giving "low" elements previously in the decorative background of images prominent emphasis. In the second half of the 16th century, Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer painted in Antwerp works showing in the foreground cooks or market-sellers amidst

1455-427: A multitude of still-life elements ostensibly to reproduce a 'slice of life ' ". The trompe-l'œil painting, which intends to deceive the viewer into thinking the scene is real, is a specialized type of still life, usually showing inanimate and relatively flat objects. Still-life paintings often adorn the interior of ancient Egyptian tombs. It was believed that food objects and other items depicted there would, in

1552-527: A painting's artistic merit was based primarily on its subject. In the Academic system, the highest form of painting consisted of images of historical , Biblical or mythological significance, with still-life subjects relegated to the very lowest order of artistic recognition. Instead of using still life to glorify nature, some artists, such as John Constable and Camille Corot , chose landscapes to serve that end. When Neoclassicism started to go into decline by

1649-644: A series of paintings on the same subject matter about 30 years earlier. One of the recurring themes in Flemish and Dutch genre painting is that of the merry company . These works typically show a group of figures at a party, whether making music at home or just drinking in a tavern. Other common types of scenes showed markets or fairs, village festivities ("kermesse"), or soldiers in their camp or guardroom. The Dutch painter Pieter van Laer arrived in 1625 in Rome where he started to paint genre paintings incorporating scenes of

1746-419: A similar sympathetic female portrait with images of game birds. In Catholic Italy and Spain, the pure vanitas painting was rare, and there were far fewer still-life specialists. In Southern Europe there is more employment of the soft naturalism of Caravaggio and less emphasis on hyper-realism in comparison with Northern European styles. In France, painters of still lifes ( nature morte ) were influenced by both

1843-426: A skull, an hourglass or pocket watch, a candle burning down or a book with pages turning, would serve as a moralizing message on the ephemerality of sensory pleasures. Often some of the fruits and flowers themselves would be shown starting to spoil or fade to emphasize the same point. Another type of still life, known as ontbijtjes or "breakfast paintings", represent both a literal presentation of delicacies that

1940-502: A surrealist air. Even while both Dutch and Spanish still life often had an embedded moral purpose, the austerity, which some find akin to the bleakness of some of the Spanish plateaus, appears to reject the sensual pleasures, plenitude, and luxury of Dutch still-life paintings. Even though Italian still-life painting (in Italian referred to as natura morta , "dead nature") was gaining in popularity, it remained historically less respected than

2037-411: Is above another who only produces fruit, flowers or seafood. He who paints living animals is more estimable than those who only represent dead things without movement, and as man is the most perfect work of God on the earth, it is also certain that he who becomes an imitator of God in representing human figures, is much more excellent than all the others ...". Still life developed as a separate category in

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2134-527: Is added to elevate the subject. This sort of large-scale still life continued to develop in Flemish painting after the separation of the North and South, but is rare in Dutch painting, although other works in this tradition anticipate the " merry company " type of genre painting . Gradually, religious content diminished in size and placement in this type of painting, though moral lessons continued as sub-contexts. One of

2231-544: Is completely absent, as is meticulously detailed brushwork. Impressionists instead focused on experimentation in broad, dabbing brush strokes, tonal values, and colour placement. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were inspired by nature's colour schemes but reinterpreted nature with their own colour harmonies, which sometimes proved startlingly unnaturalistic. As Gauguin stated, "Colours have their own meanings." Variations in perspective are also tried, such as using tight cropping and high angles, as with Fruit Displayed on

2328-432: Is one of the first examples of pure still life, precisely rendered and set at eye level. Though not overtly symbolic, this painting was owned by Cardinal Federico Borromeo and may have been appreciated for both religious and aesthetic reasons. Jan Bruegel painted his Large Milan Bouquet (1606) for the cardinal, as well, claiming that he painted it 'fatta tutti del natturel' (made all from nature) and he charged extra for

2425-463: Is one of the outstanding examples of this trend, with borders featuring an extraordinary range of objects, including coins and fishing-nets, chosen to complement the text or main image at that particular point. Flemish workshops later in the century took the naturalism of border elements even further. Gothic millefleur tapestries are another example of the general increasing interest in accurate depictions of plants and animals. The set of The Lady and

2522-402: Is surpassed by only a very few...He painted barbershops and shoemakers' stalls, donkeys, vegetables, and such, and for that reason came to be called the 'painter of vulgar subjects'; yet these works are altogether delightful, and they were sold at higher prices than the greatest [paintings] of many other artists." By 1300, starting with Giotto and his pupils, still-life painting was revived in

2619-401: Is the family portrait combining figures with a well-set table of food, which symbolizes both the piety of the human subjects and their thanks for God's abundance. Around this time, simple still-life depictions divorced of figures (but not allegorical meaning) were beginning to be painted on the outside of shutters of private devotional paintings. Another step toward the autonomous still life was

2716-604: The Bamboccianti . The initial Bamboccianti included Andries and Jan Both , Karel Dujardin , Jan Miel and Johannes Lingelbach . Sébastien Bourdon was also associated with this group during his early career. Other Bamboccianti include Michiel Sweerts , Thomas Wijck , Dirck Helmbreker , Jan Asselyn , Anton Goubau , Willem Reuter , and Jacob van Staverden . Their whose works would inspire local artists Michelangelo Cerquozzi , Giacomo Ceruti , Antonio Cifrondi , and Giuseppe Maria Crespi among many others. Louis le Nain

2813-515: The Emperor Rudolf II , and there were many engraved illustrations for books (often then hand-coloured), such as Hans Collaert 's Florilegium , published by Plantin in 1600. Around 1600 flower paintings in oils became something of a craze; Karel van Mander painted some works himself, and records that other Northern Mannerist artists such as Cornelis van Haarlem also did so. No surviving flower-pieces by them are known, but many survive by

2910-721: The Labours of the Months in the calendar section of books of hours , most famously the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry . The Low Countries dominated the field until the 18th century, and in the 17th century both Flemish Baroque painting and Dutch Golden Age painting produced numerous specialists who mostly painted genre scenes. In the previous century, the Flemish Renaissance painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen painted innovative large-scale genre scenes, sometimes including

3007-501: The Low Countries in the last quarter of the 16th century. The English term still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven while Romance languages (as well as Greek, Polish, Russian and Turkish) tend to use terms meaning dead nature . 15th-century Early Netherlandish painting had developed highly illusionistic techniques in both panel painting and illuminated manuscripts , where

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3104-505: The Roman wall paintings and floor mosaics unearthed at Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villa Boscoreale , including the later familiar motif of a glass bowl of fruit. Decorative mosaics termed "emblema", found in the homes of rich Romans, demonstrated the range of food enjoyed by the upper classes, and also functioned as signs of hospitality and as celebrations of the seasons and of life. By

3201-617: The Surrealists placed recognizable still-life objects in their dreamscapes. In Joan Miró 's still-life paintings, objects appear weightless and float in lightly suggested two-dimensional space, and even mountains are drawn as simple lines. In Italy during this time, Giorgio Morandi was the foremost still-life painter, exploring a wide variety of approaches to depicting everyday bottles and kitchen implements. Dutch artist M. C. Escher , best known for his detailed yet ambiguous graphics, created Still life and Street (1937), his updated version of

3298-552: The bourgeoisie , or middle class . Genre subjects appear in many traditions of art. Painted decorations in ancient Egyptian tombs often depict banquets, recreation, and agrarian scenes, and Peiraikos is mentioned by Pliny the Elder as a Hellenistic panel painter of "low" subjects, such as survive in mosaic versions and provincial wall-paintings at Pompeii : "barbers' shops, cobblers' stalls, asses, eatables and similar subjects". Medieval illuminated manuscripts often illustrated scenes of everyday peasant life, especially in

3395-494: The pompier art of French academicians such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–91). In the second half of the century interest in genre scenes, often in historical settings or with pointed social or moral comment, greatly increased across Europe. William Powell Frith (1819–1909) was perhaps the most famous English genre painter of the Victorian era, painting large and extremely crowded scenes;

3492-581: The tulip (imported to Europe from Turkey), were celebrated in still-life paintings. The horticultural explosion was of widespread interest in Europe and artist capitalized on that to produce thousands of still-life paintings. Some regions and courts had particular interests. The depiction of citrus, for example, was a particular passion of the Medici court in Florence, Italy. This great diffusion of natural specimens and

3589-609: The "grand manner" painting of historical, religious, and mythic subjects. On the other hand, successful Italian still-life artists found ample patronage in their day. Furthermore, women painters, few as they were, commonly chose or were restricted to painting still life; Giovanna Garzoni , Laura Bernasconi , Maria Theresa van Thielen , and Fede Galizia are notable examples. Many leading Italian artists in other genre, also produced some still-life paintings. In particular, Caravaggio applied his influential form of naturalism to still life. His Basket of Fruit ( c.  1595 –1600)

3686-525: The 16th century, food and flowers would again appear as symbols of the seasons and of the five senses. Also starting in Roman times is the tradition of the use of the skull in paintings as a symbol of mortality and earthly remains, often with the accompanying phrase Omnia mors aequat (Death makes all equal). These vanitas images have been re-interpreted through the last 400 years of art history, starting with Dutch painters around 1600. The popular appreciation of

3783-452: The 1830s, genre and portrait painting became the focus for the Realist and Romantic artistic revolutions. Many of the great artists of that period included still life in their body of work. The still-life paintings of Francisco Goya , Gustave Courbet , and Eugène Delacroix convey a strong emotional current, and are less concerned with exactitude and more interested in mood. Though patterned on

3880-766: The American art community, also founded a society for the training of artists and a famous museum of natural curiosities. His son Raphaelle Peale was one of a group of early American still-life artists, which also included John F. Francis , Charles Bird King , and John Johnston. By the second half of the 19th century, Martin Johnson Heade introduced the American version of the habitat or biotope picture, which placed flowers and birds in simulated outdoor environments. The American trompe-l'œil paintings also flourished during this period, created by John Haberle , William Michael Harnett , and John Frederick Peto . Peto specialized in

3977-486: The Catholic Southern Netherlands the genre of garland paintings was developed. Around 1607–1608, Antwerp artists Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen started creating these pictures which consist of an image (usually devotional) which is encircled by a lush still life wreath. The paintings were collaborations between two specialists: a still life and a figure painter. Daniel Seghers developed

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4074-419: The Elder and Jan August Hendrik Leys . Under the influence of foreign artistic movements such a realism, Belgian artists in the second half of the 19th century were able to break away from the old traditions and create a new format for their genre paintings. An example is Henri de Braekeleer who used light and colour to infuse his intimist genre scenes with a modernist spirit. The first true genre painter in

4171-587: The Northern and Southern schools, borrowing from the vanitas paintings of the Netherlands and the spare arrangements of Spain. The 18th century to a large extent continued to refine 17th-century formulae, and levels of production decreased. In the Rococo style floral decoration became far more common on porcelain , wallpaper , fabrics and carved wood furnishings, so that buyers preferred their paintings to have figures for

4268-528: The Roman Campagna . He also joined a loose organisation of Flemish and Dutch painters in Rome known as the Bentvueghels (Dutch for 'birds of a feather'). Van Laer was given the nickname "Il Bamboccio", which means "ugly doll" or "puppet". A number of Flemish and Dutch and later also Italian painters, who painted genre scenes of the Roman countryside inspired by van Laer's works were subsequently referred to as

4365-795: The Unicorn is the best-known example, designed in Paris around 1500 and then woven in Flanders . The development of oil painting technique by Jan van Eyck and other Northern European artists made it possible to paint everyday objects in this hyper-realistic fashion, owing to the slow drying, mixing, and layering qualities of oil colours. Among the first to break free of religious meaning were Leonardo da Vinci , who created watercolour studies of fruit (around 1495) as part of his restless examination of nature, and Albrecht Dürer who also made precise coloured drawings of flora and fauna. Petrus Christus ' portrait of

4462-594: The United States was the German immigrant John Lewis Krimmel . He was influenced, at least initially, by English artists such as William Hogarth and Scottish painters such as David Wilkie and produced lively and gently humorous scenes of life in Philadelphia from 1812 to 1821. Other notable 19th-century genre painters from the United States include George Caleb Bingham , William Sidney Mount , and Eastman Johnson . Harry Roseland focused on scenes of poor African Americans in

4559-518: The afterlife, become real and available for use by the deceased. Ancient Greek vase paintings also demonstrate great skill in depicting everyday objects and animals. Peiraikos is mentioned by Pliny the Elder as a panel painter of "low" subjects, such as survive in mosaic versions and provincial wall-paintings at Pompeii : "barbers' shops, cobblers' stalls, asses, eatables and similar subjects". Similar still life, more simply decorative in intent, but with realistic perspective, have also been found in

4656-445: The artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) used genre scenes in painting and printmaking as a medium for dark commentary on the human condition. Beginning in about 1808 Goya painted a significant number of genre scenes and he dealt with genre subjects again in various drawings during the period from 1810 to 1823. With the decline of religious and historical painting in the 19th century, artists increasingly found their subject matter in

4753-460: The artist also included a scabrous meaning in his painting. Genre painters often included symbolic meanings in their paintings. For instance, Adriaen Brouwer painted a number of genre portraits that represent the five senses or the seven deadly sins. An example is his genre group portrait The Smokers which depicts the sense of taste. Other artists included moral meanings into their genre scenes. Jan Steen's The Happy Family painted in 1668 depicts

4850-464: The attention of the Royal Académie and the numerous collectors who purchased her paintings. This interaction between art and nature was quite common in Dutch , Flemish and French still lifes. Her work reveals the clear influence of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin , as well as 17th-century Dutch masters, whose work has been far more highly valued, but what made Vallayer-Coster's style stand out against

4947-602: The borders often featured elaborate displays of flowers, insects and, in a work like the Hours of Catherine of Cleves , a great variety of objects. When the illuminated manuscript was displaced by the printed book, the same skills were later deployed in scientific botanical illustration; the Low Countries led Europe in both botany and its depiction in art. The Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1601) made watercolour and gouache paintings of flowers and other still-life subjects for

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5044-434: The burgeoning interest in natural illustration throughout Europe, resulted in the nearly simultaneous creation of modern still-life paintings around 1600. At the turn of the century the Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán pioneered the Spanish still life with austerely tranquil paintings of vegetables, before entering a monastery in his forties in 1603, after which he painted religious subjects. Prominent Academicians of

5141-600: The butterfly represents transformation and resurrection while the dragonfly symbolizes transience and the ant hard work and attention to the harvest. Flemish and Dutch artists also branched out and revived the ancient Greek still life tradition of trompe-l'œil , particularly the imitation of nature or mimesis , which they termed bedriegertje ("little deception"). In addition to these types of still life, Dutch artists identified and separately developed "kitchen and market" paintings, breakfast and food table still life, vanitas paintings, and allegorical collection paintings. In

5238-599: The classification of specimens. Natural objects began to be appreciated as individual objects of study apart from any religious or mythological associations. The early science of herbal remedies began at this time as well, which was a practical extension of this new knowledge. In addition, wealthy patrons began to underwrite the collection of animal and mineral specimens, creating extensive cabinets of curiosities . These specimens served as models for painters who sought realism and novelty. Shells, insects, exotic fruits and flowers began to be collected and traded, and new plants such as

5335-478: The context of modern art the term "genre painting" has come to be associated mainly with painting of an especially anecdotal or sentimental nature, painted in a traditionally realistic technique. In Belgium, the nationalism of the new state born in 1830 gave rise to history painting glorifying the past of the nation and genre painting returning to the models of 17th-century. Examples of artists working in this retro style include Ferdinand de Braekeleer , Willem Linnig

5432-467: The course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During these centuries, the genre of still life was placed lowest on the hierarchical ladder. Vallayer-Coster had a way about her paintings that resulted in their attractiveness. It was the "bold, decorative lines of her compositions, the richness of her colours and simulated textures, and the feats of illusionism she achieved in depicting wide variety of objects, both natural and artificial" which drew in

5529-608: The depiction of exhausting work are exemplified by Barge Haulers on the Volga ( Ilya Repin , 1873). History painting itself shifted from the exclusive depiction of events of great public importance to the depiction of genre scenes in historical times, both the private moments of great figures, and the everyday life of ordinary people. In French art this was known as the Troubador style . This trend, already apparent by 1817 when Ingres painted Henri IV Playing with His Children , culminated in

5626-412: The earlier still-life subjects of Chardin , Édouard Manet 's still-life paintings are strongly tonal and clearly headed toward Impressionism. Henri Fantin-Latour , using a more traditional technique, was famous for his exquisite flower paintings and made his living almost exclusively painting still life for collectors. However, it was not until the final decline of the Academic hierarchy in Europe, and

5723-908: The early 17th century, such as Andrea Sacchi , felt that genre and still-life painting did not carry the "gravitas" merited for painting to be considered great. An influential formulation of 1667 by André Félibien , a historiographer, architect and theoretician of French classicism became the classic statement of the theory of the hierarchy of genres for the 18th century: Celui qui fait parfaitement des païsages est au-dessus d'un autre qui ne fait que des fruits, des fleurs ou des coquilles. Celui qui peint des animaux vivants est plus estimable que ceux qui ne représentent que des choses mortes & sans mouvement ; & comme la figure de l'homme est le plus parfait ouvrage de Dieu sur la Terre, il est certain aussi que celui qui se rend l'imitateur de Dieu en peignant des figures humaines, est beaucoup plus excellent que tous les autres ... He who produces perfect landscapes

5820-505: The early 20th century. Adapting Cézanne's shifting of planes and axes, the Cubists subdued the colour palette of the Fauves and focused instead on deconstructing objects into pure geometrical forms and planes. Between 1910 and 1920, Cubist artists like Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , and Juan Gris painted many still-life compositions, often including musical instruments, bringing still life to

5917-422: The expansion in size and ambition in 19th-century genre painting was a common trend. Other 19th-century English genre painters include Augustus Leopold Egg , Frederick Daniel Hardy , George Elgar Hicks , William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais . Scotland produced two influential genre painters, David Allan (1744–96) and Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841). Wilkie's The Cottar's Saturday Night (1837) inspired

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6014-435: The extra effort. These were among many still-life paintings in the cardinal's collection, in addition to his large collection of curios. Among other Italian still life, Bernardo Strozzi 's The Cook is a "kitchen scene" in the Dutch manner, which is both a detailed portrait of a cook and the game birds she is preparing. In a similar manner, one of Rembrandt's rare still-life paintings, Little Girl with Dead Peacocks combines

6111-579: The flower paintings were futile to her career. Nevertheless, this collection contained floral studies in oil, watercolour and gouache . With the rise of the European Academies, most notably the Académie française which held a central role in Academic art , still life began to fall from favor. The Academies taught the doctrine of the " Hierarchy of genres " (or "Hierarchy of Subject Matter"), which held that

6208-503: The forefront of artistic innovation, almost for the first time. Still life was also the subject matter in the first Synthetic Cubist collage works, such as Picasso's oval "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912). In these works, still-life objects overlap and intermingle, barely maintaining identifiable two-dimensional forms, losing individual surface texture, and merging into the background—achieving goals nearly opposite to those of traditional still life. Fernand Léger 's still life introduced

6305-455: The foreground, while a background scene conveys the dangers of drunkenness and lechery. The type of very large kitchen or market scene developed by Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer typically depicts an abundance of food with a kitchenware still life and burly Flemish kitchen-maids. A small religious scene can often be made out in the distance, or a theme such as the Four Seasons

6402-694: The form of fictional niches on religious wall paintings which depicted everyday objects. Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance , still life in Western art remained primarily an adjunct to Christian religious subjects, and convened religious and allegorical meaning. This was particularly true in the work of Northern European artists, whose fascination with highly detailed optical realism and symbolism led them to lavish great attention on their paintings' overall message. Painters like Jan van Eyck often used still-life elements as part of an iconographic program. In

6499-471: The genre further. Originally serving a devotional function, garland paintings became extremely popular and were widely used as decoration of homes. A special genre of still life was the so-called pronkstilleven (Dutch for 'ostentatious still life'). This style of ornate still-life painting was developed in the 1640s in Antwerp by Flemish artists such as Frans Snyders and Adriaen van Utrecht . They painted still lifes that emphasized abundance by depicting

6596-585: The genre was the tradition, mostly centred on Antwerp , of the "monumental still life", which were large paintings that included great spreads of still-life material with figures and often animals. This was a development by Pieter Aertsen , whose A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551, now Uppsala ) introduced the type with a painting that still startles. Another example is "The Butcher Shop" by Aertsen's nephew Joachim Beuckelaer (1568), with its realistic depiction of raw meats dominating

6693-519: The growing Dutch middle classes, who were replacing Church and State as the principal patrons of art in the Netherlands. Added to this was the Dutch mania for horticulture, particularly the tulip . These two views of flowers—as aesthetic objects and as religious symbols— merged to create a very strong market for this type of still life. Still life, like most Dutch art work, was generally sold in open markets or by dealers, or by artists at their studios, and rarely commissioned; therefore, artists usually chose

6790-619: The late Middle Ages, still-life elements, mostly flowers but also animals and sometimes inanimate objects, were painted with increasing realism in the borders of illuminated manuscripts , developing models and technical advances that were used by painters of larger images. There was considerable overlap between the artists making miniatures for manuscripts and those painting panels, especially in Early Netherlandish painting . The Hours of Catherine of Cleves , probably made in Utrecht around 1440,

6887-552: The leading specialists, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Ambrosius Bosschaert , both active in the Southern Netherlands. While artists in the North found limited opportunity to produce the religious iconography which had long been their staple—images of religious subjects were forbidden in the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church —the continuing Northern tradition of detailed realism and hidden symbols appealed to

6984-466: The life around them. Realists such as Gustave Courbet (1819–77) upset expectations by depicting everyday scenes in large canvases of a scale traditionally reserved for "important" subjects. They thus blurred the boundary which had set genre painting apart as a "minor" category. Realist paintings on such a scale, and the new type showing people at work, emphasizing the effort involved, would not normally be called "genre paintings". Both monumental scale and

7081-422: The many painters specializing in genre subjects in the Low Countries during the 17th century. The generally small scale of these artists' paintings was appropriate for their display in the homes of middle class purchasers. The apparent 'realism' of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art gives the viewer the initial impression that the artist solely intends to depict scenes of common life in a realistic way. Underneath

7178-474: The moralistic vanitas message of their Dutch predecessors. The Rococo love of artifice led to a rise in appreciation in France for trompe-l'œil (French: "trick the eye") painting. Jean-Baptiste Chardin 's still-life paintings employ a variety of techniques from Dutch-style realism to softer harmonies. The bulk of Anne Vallayer-Coster 's work was devoted to the language of still life as it had been developed in

7275-1106: The nostalgic wall-rack painting while Harnett achieved the highest level of hyper-realism in his pictorial celebrations of American life through familiar objects. The first four decades of the 20th century formed an exceptional artistic ferment and revolution period. Avant-garde movements rapidly evolved and overlapped in a march towards nonfigurative, total abstraction. The still life and other representational art continued to evolve and adjust until mid-century when total abstraction, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock 's drip paintings, eliminated all recognizable content. The century began with several trends taking hold in art. In 1901, Paul Gauguin painted Still Life with Sunflowers , his homage to his friend Van Gogh who had died eleven years earlier. The group known as Les Nabis , including Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard , took up Gauguin's harmonic theories and added elements inspired by Japanese woodcuts to their still-life paintings. French artist Odilon Redon also painted notable still life during this period, especially flowers. Henri Matisse reduced

7372-406: The objects depicted. Later still-life works are produced with a variety of media and technology, such as found objects, photography, computer graphics , as well as video and sound. The term includes the painting of dead animals, especially game. Live ones are considered animal art , although in practice they were often painted from dead models. Because of the use of plants and animals as a subject,

7469-489: The other still-life painters was her unique way of coalescing representational illusionism with decorative compositional structures. The end of the eighteenth century and the fall of the French monarchy closed the doors on Vallayer-Coster's still-life 'era' and opened them to her new style of florals. It has been argued that this was the highlight of her career and what she is best known for. However, it has also been argued that

7566-414: The painting of symbolic flowers in vases on the back of secular portraits around 1475. Jacopo de' Barbari went a step further with his Still Life with Partridge and Gauntlets (1504), among the earliest signed and dated trompe-l'œil still-life paintings, which contains minimal religious content. Though most still lifes after 1600 were relatively small paintings, a crucial stage in the development of

7663-423: The perfect vehicle for his revolutionary explorations in geometric spatial organization. For Cézanne, still life was a primary means of taking painting away from an illustrative or mimetic function to one demonstrating independently the elements of colour, form, and line, a major step towards Abstract art . Additionally, Cézanne's experiments can be seen as leading directly to the development of Cubist still life in

7760-526: The post-American Civil War South, and John Rogers (1829–1904) was a sculptor whose small genre works, mass-produced in cast plaster, were immensely popular in America. The works of American painter Ernie Barnes (1938–2009) and those of illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) exemplify a more modern type of genre painting. Japanese ukiyo-e prints are rich in depictions of people at leisure and at work, as are Korean paintings, particularly those created in

7857-531: The presence of Flemish artists working on projects in Spain as well as through Spain's sovereignty over the Spanish Netherlands. During the Spanish Golden Age of painting in the 17th century, many picaresque genre scenes of street life as well as the kitchen scenes known as bodegones were painted by Spanish artists such as Velázquez (1599–1660) and Murillo (1617–82). More than a century later,

7954-461: The realism of still-life painting is related in the ancient Greek legend of Zeuxis and Parrhasius , who are said to have once competed to create the most lifelike objects, history's earliest descriptions of trompe-l'œil painting. As Pliny the Elder recorded in ancient Roman times, Greek artists centuries earlier were already advanced in the arts of portrait painting , genre painting and still life. He singled out Peiraikos , "whose artistry

8051-419: The realistic representation are, however, often hidden underlying meanings, either moral or symbolic. For instance, Gabriel Metsu 's The Poultry seller , 1662 shows an old poultry seller handing a young woman a live rooster with its head craning upwards. The suggestive pose of the rooster's head and the fact that the Dutch word for 'birds' (vogelen) was also a vulgar term for sexual intercourse indicated that

8148-419: The relatively few Italian works in the style, Annibale Carracci 's treatment of the same subject in 1583, Butcher's Shop , begins to remove the moral messages, as did other "kitchen and market" still-life paintings of this period. Vincenzo Campi probably introduced the Antwerp style to Italy in the 1570s. The tradition continued into the next century, with several works by Rubens , who mostly sub-contracted

8245-550: The rendering of still-life objects even further to little more than bold, flat outlines filled with bright colours. He also simplified perspective and introduced multi-colour backgrounds. In some of his still-life paintings, such as Still Life with Eggplants , his table of objects is nearly lost amidst the other colourful patterns filling the rest of the room. Other exponents of Fauvism , such as Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain , further explored pure colour and abstraction in their still life. Paul Cézanne found in still life

8342-643: The rise of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, that technique and colour harmony triumphed over subject matter, and that still life was once again avidly practiced by artists. In his early still life, Claude Monet shows the influence of Fantin-Latour, but is one of the first to break the tradition of the dark background, which Pierre-Auguste Renoir also discards in Still Life with Bouquet and Fan (1871), with its bright orange background. With Impressionist still life, allegorical and mythological content

8439-475: The still-life and animal elements to specialist masters such as Frans Snyders and his pupil Jan Fyt . By the second half of the 16th century, the autonomous still life evolved. The 16th century witnessed an explosion of interest in the natural world and the creation of lavish botanical encyclopædias recording the discoveries of the New World and Asia. It also prompted the beginning of scientific illustration and

8536-443: The still-life artform is that it allows an artist much freedom to experiment with the arrangement of elements within a composition of a painting. Still life, as a particular genre, began with Netherlandish painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the English term still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven . Early still-life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to

8633-504: The still-life category also shares commonalities with zoological and especially botanical illustration . However, with visual or fine art, the work is not intended merely to illustrate the subject correctly. Still life occupied the lowest rung of the hierarchy of genres , but has been extremely popular with buyers. As well as the independent still-life subject, still-life painting encompasses other types of painting with prominent still-life elements, usually symbolic, and "images that rely on

8730-827: The subject matter and arrangement. So popular was this type of still-life painting, that much of the technique of Dutch flower painting was codified in the 1740 treatise Groot Schilderboeck by Gerard de Lairesse, which gave wide-ranging advice on colour, arranging, brushwork, preparation of specimens, harmony, composition, perspective, etc. The symbolism of flowers had evolved since early Christian days. The most common flowers and their symbolic meanings include: rose (Virgin Mary, transience, Venus, love); lily (Virgin Mary, virginity, female breast, purity of mind or justice); tulip (showiness, nobility); sunflower (faithfulness, divine love, devotion); violet (modesty, reserve, humility); columbine (melancholy); poppy (power, sleep, death). As for insects,

8827-534: The textures of fur and feather with simple backgrounds, often the plain white of a lime-washed larder wall, that showed them off to advantage. By the 18th century, in many cases, the religious and allegorical connotations of still-life paintings were dropped and kitchen table paintings evolved into calculated depictions of varied colour and form, displaying everyday foods. The French aristocracy employed artists to execute paintings of bounteous and extravagant still-life subjects that graced their dining table, also without

8924-584: The traditional Dutch table still life. In England Eliot Hodgkin was using tempera for his highly detailed still-life paintings. Genre painting Genre painting (or petit genre ), a form of genre art , depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached either individually or collectively, thus distinguishing it from history paintings (also called grand genre ) and portraits . A work would often be considered as

9021-437: The upper class might enjoy and a religious reminder to avoid gluttony. Around 1650 Samuel van Hoogstraten painted one of the first wall-rack pictures, trompe-l'œil still-life paintings which feature objects tied, tacked or attached in some other fashion to a wall board, a type of still life very popular in the United States in the 19th century. Another variation was the trompe-l'œil still life depicted objects associated with

9118-503: The use of abundant white space and coloured, sharply defined, overlapping geometrical shapes to produce a more mechanical effect. Rejecting the flattening of space by Cubists, Marcel Duchamp and other members of the Dada movement, went in a radically different direction, creating 3-D "ready-made" still-life sculptures. As part of restoring some symbolic meaning to still life, the Futurists and

9215-899: Was an important exponent of genre painting in 17th-century France, painting groups of peasants at home, where the 18th century would bring a heightened interest in the depiction of everyday life, whether through the romanticized paintings of Watteau and Fragonard , or the careful realism of Chardin . Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) and others painted detailed and rather sentimental groups or individual portraits of peasants that were to be influential on 19th-century painting. In England, William Hogarth (1697–1764) conveyed comedy, social criticism and moral lessons through canvases that told stories of ordinary people ful of narrative detail (aided by long sub-titles), often in serial form, as in his A Rake's Progress , first painted in 1732–33, then engraved and published in print form in 1735. Developments in 16th Netherlandish art were received in Spain through

9312-410: Was enormous, and they were very widely exported, especially to northern Europe; Britain hardly produced any itself. German still life followed closely the Dutch models; Georg Flegel was a pioneer in pure still life without figures and created the compositional innovation of placing detailed objects in cabinets, cupboards, and display cases, and producing simultaneous multiple views. In Spanish art ,

9409-437: Was far more popular in the contemporary Low Countries , today Belgium and Netherlands (then Flemish and Dutch artists), than it ever was in southern Europe. Northern still lifes had many subgenres; the breakfast piece was augmented by the trompe-l'œil , the flower bouquet , and the vanitas . In Spain there were much fewer patrons for this sort of thing, but a type of breakfast piece did become popular, featuring

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