The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

Still Life
Perspectives from The Artist's Road


Lilacs in a Window          Oil          Mary Cassatt          (PD)

   The art of still life painting is a time-honored one which has been around since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. Still life paintings were often used to adorn the interiors of Egyptian tombs with the belief that these depictions of food and other objects would actually become real and available for use by the deceased in the afterlife. The ancient Romans adorned their homes with paintings and mosaics of food and flowers which functioned as signs of hospitality and as celebrations of the seasons and of life. Down through the long course of history, still life painting has frequently been used to convey allegorical or metaphorical messages, often as part of a religious iconography. Among the first to break free from religious meaning were Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer, who made delightful studies of flora and fauna as part of their interest in exploring the natural world.

   The English term, “still life”, is derived from the Dutch equivalent "stilleven". Romance languages used the term, “dead nature” as in the French "nature morte". As the popularity of still life painting spread throughout Europe, there developed stylistic differences between northern European art and southern. The Flemish and Dutch tended to paint in a hyper-realistic style, while the southern artists favored the softer naturalism of Caravaggio. Over time, many genres and sub-genres of still life evolved, gained popularity and faded away to be replaced with the new. The French artists of the 1700s, most notably Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, were adept at borrowing from both the northern and southern traditions to make an entirely new type of still life art, which would eventually influence future generations of painters. Manet, Matisse, Cezanne, Braque, Soutine, Morandi and recently, Lucian Freud, all acknowledged their indebtedness to Chardin in their work.

   With the dawning of Impressionist still life, allegorical and mythological content was completely dropped, as was meticulously detailed brush work. Impressionists instead focused on experimentation in broad, dabbing brush strokes, tonal values, and color placement. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were inspired by nature’s color schemes but reinterpreted nature with their own color harmonies, which sometimes proved startlingly unnaturalistic. As Gauguin stated, "Colors have their own meanings."

   Today, there is renewed interest in beautifully executed representational still life paintings, the best of which borrow from the masters of the past while adding a contemporary sensibility to the work.