Background
Although still life elements had always been included in paintings, as a genre, still life really only came to prominence in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Increased world trade enabled the wealthy to import more lavish and exotic goods, and a flower craze (especially tulips) flourished across Europe. Botanical gardens were created and wealthy collectors created curio cabinets comprising all manner of goods – shells, butterflies, insects, stuffed birds and mammals – all of which proved interesting specimens for artists to portray.
Artists then began to put these objects together, both to demonstrate their skills (still life allows the artists to have great control over the composition, viewpoint, accuracy of portraying decorative objects, colour, mood and pattern) and also to speak through the objects, giving a message, or even layers of messages, in terms of symbolism / iconography / associative meaning. These messages, especially religious themes, would have been well known since medieval times, but something that is more or less lost to us now without having to research each item.
The still life (stilleven) was particular popular in what is now Belgium and The Netherlands. Gradually artists moved away from religious and moralising works towards portraying items of luxury and the finer things in life – expensive fruits, wine and other foods, fine fabrics, silver and glassware, reflecting the tastes of the merchants who were buying these pieces. Many sub-genes emerged: breakfast pieces, large kitchen scenes, flower bouquets, vanitas and pronk (roughly meaning sumptuous display) to suit all tastes. The fact that still life paintings were on a smaller scale also meant they were affordable to more people, and you didn’t need a huge room to display them.
Symbolism and meaning
Symbolism in paintings takes many forms – from issues around life and death in vanitas paintings, religious symbolism, and the language of flowers.
Vanitas (which comes from a quotation from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.') are probably the most well known form of symbolism in paintings in this era. After I had visited the Hockney exhibition, I popped round to the National Gallery as I knew they had paintings of this nature. The two that I looked closely at were:
Harmen Steenwyck - Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (about 1640)
Jan Jansz. Treck: Vanitas Still Life (1648)
As both paintings contained similar objects, I have just listed below the objects in the Jan Jansz Treck painting and their allegorical meaning:
A scallop shell (which looks like it contains water): the scallop shell is a religious image, often being portrayed as the vessel used to baptise Christ. It is also a symbol of pilgrimage, and one theory is that pilgrims would ask for a “scallop’s shell” worth of food or drink from homes on their journey, taking only a small amount from each to avoid over-burdening the giver.
Musical instruments (a violin and flute/recorder); the vice of enjoyment.
A skull wreathed in straw: the skull is a very popular, and potent, symbol in vanitas works and is probably the most obvious symbol of death and decay.
Books, papers and drawings (the wording on the manuscript translates as “Evil is its own reward”: a false pride in knowledge (which on death would become worthless).
A pipe: life being snuffed out (sometimes shown extinguished with smoke fading to nothing).
An hourglass: to mark the passage of time, and eventually one’s own death.
Ceramic jug (containing wine?); an armour helmet; a decorative box: I could not find anything specifically relating to these – they may have symbolism or alternatively just be decorative items to pull the other items together.
Tronk
Willem Kalf - Still Life with Drinking-Horn (about 1653)
This is a painting that can be referred to as “tronk” (roughly translated from the Dutch as sumptuous still life) and shows a range of very expensive objects only available to the very wealthy – e.g. the rug is on the table, not the floor, as it would have been imported from the Far East and far too precious to walk on.
It is beautifully painted, and very detailed to show the artist’s skill in handling paint and their ability to depict varying textures and surfaces. This still does have symbolism contained in it – bread and wine are a traditional religious symbol of the body and blood of Christ, and the lemon was traditionally used to moralise – something which looks beautiful from the outside but was very bitter to taste.
As I really love this painting, I studied it in quite some detail. Compositionally, the painting contains strong lines: diagonals created by the lobster and platter, the horizontal table and the verticals created by the glasses and horn. The horn is placed to lead the eye around the painting in an s-curve around the horn, along the platter and lobster claw, and towards the lemon. The central point of the painting (both mathematically and compositionally) is where the lobster and silver stand of the horn meet.
The painting uses chiaroscuro by placing light, reflective highlights against the dark, matt background. Four glasses, made visible only by the highlights of light, and the liquid contained in them, are dissimilar to show the artist’s skill of representation and observation. The platter on which the left-hand glass sits is meticulously painted, again using chiaroscuro to set it against the background, in swirls of grey and white paint, with ochre tones to create the objects reflected in its surface. The pale yellow of the peeled lemon is reflected in the bowl of the glass and then onto the white, crumpled napkin.
The elaborate drinking horn is created with ochre, brown and red tones which have been streaked to show the semi-translucent material of the horn itself. The lobster is set upon a large silver platter which the artist has used to portray the detailed underside of the lobster tail. The detail on the lobster is incredible – every surface texture is shown from the feathering under the tail to the coiled textured of the feelers with white highlights used sparingly to indicate the hard, polished texture of the shell.
As a contrast to all the reflective objects, the artist has painted a sumptuous rug with a velvety texture, with strong folds to indicate the weight of the rug and paler spots of colour appear to have been painted over a more solid background to indicate the individual tufts of silk.
Flower paintings
Viewed in the National Gallery
Rachel Ruysch: Flowers in a Vase (about 1685) – still life was a genre that was deemed a suitable subject for female painters in this era. Rachel Ruysch’s father was a botanist, which probably influenced her choice to specialise in flower paintings as well as being apprenticed to a prominent Dutch still life painter. Again, the painting is very detailed, and very delicate, using the fragile stems and leaves of the plants to create a tracery around the outside of the central composition.
When researching flower paintings, I discovered that frequently artists would depict flowers from all seasons in the same vase, and achieved this by creating detailed studies of each flower as it was in bloom, using the study at a later date. I have always found this sort of painting quite stilted and artificial, and I think the reason for this may be that most painters did not overlap the flowers (as they would not be painting them from life) and so they frequently don’t look quite “right”.
Flowers also had great symbolism, as did the addition of insects (e.g. a butterfly representing the soul freed after death), shells and fruit. Some Christian flower meanings I have discovered are:
Roses – the Virgin Mary and/or love
Lilies – the Virgin Mary, virginity and purity
Tulips – nobility
Violets – modesty and humility
Poppies – sleep and/or death
Daisies - charity
18th Century
One of the greatest still life painters of this era was Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin – his work has a great simplicity compared with the overblown, Roccocco taste of the time (and many of the other still lifes of this time are flower paintings in this style). His paintings have a much more modern feel – I think this is partly because the objects he depicts are not expensive, or particularly showy, but everyday items in the home. His paint handling is much looser than earlier works and the tones are much more muted. While researching Chardin, I found an article below that explains his working methods well.
One painting which I felt works particularly well is Basket with Wild Strawberries (1761) – it is a very simple composition – a basket of strawberries piled up, a glass, two white carnations, two cherries and a peach. The background is in muted dark tones to highlight the strong colours of the fruit and contrast with the white flowers. The artist has used the glass to reflect the white of the flowers in the glass and also on to the table beneath, as well as the red of strawberries in each side of the glass. The casually placed white carnations successfully break the straight line of the table and the peach and cherries add a second area of focus – otherwise the eye would immediately be drawn to the brightest area of the painting (the white flowers and reflection).
19th Century
Still life really began to change towards the end of century with the Impressionist painters. The traditional still life arrangement of objects with a dark background was replaced with brighter and lighter colours, looser brushwork and an increased awareness of colour relationships, rather than a stiff, formal arrangement. I chose to concentrate on two paintings in the National Gallery, both of which demonstrate very strong colours:
Paul Gauguin: Still Life with Mangoes (about 1891-6)
The first thing you notice about this painting is the strong, vibrant colours throughout the painting. Even without knowing about Gauguin and his residency in the South Pacific, this painting just oozes tropical colours and heat. Both the background and table top are painted in oranges, green and ochre to increase the vibrancy of the bright reds, pinks and purples of the fruit. There are complementary contrasts everywhere in this painting: the blue and yellow bowl, the green and red mango, green stems and red flowers, yellow tones against the pinky purple of the mango on the plate and the shadow under the plate is a dark blue to contrast the ochre table.
The composition is totally different to more traditional works – there are no centrally placed objects, no dark background, both man-made objects are cropped and the overall focus is of a much closer, slightly elevated viewpoint. Strong tonal contrasts make the vivid colours even more vivid – the blue-white plate with its dark shadow creates a foil for the three mangoes on the plate and some of the fruits are outlined to make them stand proud of the background. The paint handling is very loose – you can see each individual brush stroke and the colours of each brush stroke. Nothing is traditionally blended, the colours are either overlaid or blend together because are artist has picked up two colours on his brush and allowed them to blend whilst the brush stroke is applied. White dabs of highlight have been applied sparingly but draw particular attention to the feathery petals of the mango flowers.
Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers (1888)
This painting in the National Gallery is one of four Sunflowers paintings that Van Gogh made – two are almost identical in composition to this one with slight colour variations. This painting has the flattest tonal background – the other versions are more mottled, broken tones whereas this has a flat yellow background and an ochre table; the boundary defined by a rough line of bright blue paint. According to the National Gallery’s caption, Van Gogh stated in a letter to his brother Theo “If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow.” Looking closely at this painting, you can see that Van Gogh has used mixtures of these two colours for the entire painting, with the additional of a little black for the deepest tones and to define the flowers. The dominant use of yellow also gives a strong warmth to the painting – you know it has been painted somewhere with strong sunshine and long, warm days.
You feel you want to reach out and touch the pom poms of petals, to run your hands over the seedheads and the tightly packed petals. I always think of sunflowers as happy flowers, they are so big and brash and they do always remind you of summer, I think more than any other flower.
In the early 20th century, art moved further and further into abstraction with still life (being a “traditional” genre) seemingly ripe for change. Cezanne was one of the first proponents towards abstraction by his simplification of objects, using distorted perspective and moving away from traditional tonal paintings towards finely gradated colours applied with small brush strokes. One of the most famous movements of the early 20th century was Cubism which took this abstraction and distorted perspective to another level.
The two main artists we associate with Cubism are Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. The Cubists rejected the idea that art should look like reality and experimented with very stylized and distorted images, based on flattened forms, multiple and contrasting viewpoints and breaking down objects into multiple geometric forms. Many of these paintings were very muted in colour but strongly tonal to achieve the effect of a fractured image. The paint has been applied very dry so achieve a textured feel and all the colours are neutral tones in grays, beiges and browns. In some cubist work the original object is discernible but in others, such as the one below, the subject is almost totally abstract and it is virtually impossible to work out what was being painted (without the title to help you!).
The Bottle of Rum, 1912
There were so many art movements in the 20th century that still life seemed to become lost among all the other movements and the trend towards abstract, conceptual art and installations. However, researching contemporary work made me realise just how wide a range of styles there are out there currently – from very traditional homages to Dutch flower paintings, photorealistic styles (such as James Gillick "Garlic and Wine" and others referred to previously), to the use of expressive colour (Peter Graham "Sienna Bouquet") to more abstract works (Annabel Fairfax "Jug and Tulips").
I think because still life is so personal to the artist (as mentioned at the beginning of this research article - because of the choices the artist makes to create the work) rather than, say, creating a portrait or a landscape, that this genre will always be very popular both with artists and those who want to purchase these works.
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