Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), Bouquet (1599). Some of the earliest examples of still life were paintings of flowers by Netherlandish Renaissance painters. Still-life painting (including vanitas), as a particular genre, achieved its greatest importance in the Golden Age of Netherlandish art (ca. 1500s–1600s).
Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Game Fowl, Vegetables and Fruits (1602), Museo del Prado Madrid


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 the still-life artform is that it allows an artist a lot of 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 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, 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 a multitude of still-life elements ostensibly to reproduce a 'slice of life'".[2] 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.[3]


Antecedents and developmentEdit





The popular appreciation of 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.[8] 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 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."[9]

Middle Ages and Early RenaissanceEdit


By 1300, starting with Giotto and his pupils, still-life painting was revived in the form of fictional niches on religious wall paintings which depicted everyday objects.[11] 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.[12] Painters like Jan van Eyck often used still-life elements as part of an iconographic program.

In 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, 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 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.[13] 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.[14]

Petrus Christus' portrait of 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 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.[15] 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.[9] Another step toward the autonomous still life was the painting of symbolic flowers in vases on the back of secular portraits around 1475.[16] Jacopo de' Barbari went a step further with his Still Life with Partridge, Iron Gloves, and Crossbow Arrows (1504), among the earliest signed and dated trompe-l'œil still-life paintings, which contains minimal religious content.[17]

Later RenaissanceEdit

Joachim Beuckelaer (1533–1575), Kitchen scene, with Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary in the background (1566), 171 × 250 cm (67.3 × 98.4 in).

Sixteenth centuryEdit


Gradually, religious content diminished in size and placement in this type of painting, though moral lessons continued as sub-contexts.[19] One of 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.[20] 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 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.[21]

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Fruitbasket (1595–96), oil on canvas, 31 x 47 cm


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.[23] This great diffusion of natural specimens and the burgeoning interest in natural illustration throughout Europe, resulted in the nearly simultaneous creation of modern still-life paintings around 1600.[24][25]


Sixteenth-century paintingsEdit

Seventeenth centuryEdit





Dutch and Flemish paintingEdit




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 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.[30] 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 the subject matter and arrangement.[31] 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.[32]


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").[8] 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.[34]




Another type of still life, known as ontbijtjes or "breakfast paintings", represent both a literal presentation of delicacies that the upper class might enjoy and a religious reminder to avoid gluttony.[37] 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.[38] Another variation was the trompe-l'œil still life depicted objects associated with 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.[39] 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 man-made objects.[40] The popularity of vanitas paintings, and these other forms of still life, soon spread from Holland to Flanders and Germany, and also to Spain[41] and France.


Dutch, Flemish, German and French paintingsEdit

Southern EuropeEdit





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 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.[45] 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) is one of the first examples of pure still life, precisely rendered and set at eye level.[46] 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 the extra effort.[47] 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.[48] In a similar manner, one of Rembrandt's rare still-life paintings, Little Girl with Dead Peacocks combines a similar sympathetic female portrait with images of game birds.[49]


Italian galleryEdit

Eighteenth centuryEdit



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 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.[52]

The bulk of Anne Vallayer-Coster's work was devoted to the language of still life as it had been developed in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[53] 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"[53] which drew in 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.[53] 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 the other still-life painters was her unique way of coalescing representational illusionism with decorative compositional structures.[53][54]

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.[55] 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 the flower paintings were futile to her career. Nevertheless, this collection contained floral studies in oil, watercolour and gouache.[55]

Nineteenth centuryEdit


When Neoclassicism started to go into decline by 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.[56] Though patterned on 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.[57]

However, it was not until the final decline of the Academic hierarchy in Europe, and 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 is completely absent, as is meticulously detailed brush work. 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."[58] Variations in perspective are also tried, such as using tight cropping and high angles, as with Fruit Displayed on a Stand by Gustave Caillebotte, a painting which was mocked at the time as a "display of fruit in a bird's-eye view."[59]



Nineteenth-century paintingsEdit

Twentieth centuryEdit



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.[63]

Henri Matisse reduced the rendering of still-life objects even further to little more than bold, flat outlines filled with bright colours. He also simplified perspective and introducing multi-colour backgrounds.[64] 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.[65] 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 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 the early 20th century.[66]

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 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.[67] Fernand Léger's still life introduced the use of abundant white space and coloured, sharply defined, overlapping geometrical shapes to produce a more mechanical effect.[68]

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 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.[66] 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.[69] Dutch artist M. C. Escher, best known for his detailed yet ambiguous graphics, created Still life and Street (1937), his updated version of the traditional Dutch table still life.[70] In England Eliot Hodgkin was using tempera for his highly detailed still-life paintings.



Starting in the 1930s, abstract expressionism severely reduced still life to raw depictions of form and colour, until by the 1950s, total abstraction dominated the art world. However, pop art in the 1960s and 1970s reversed the trend and created a new form of still life. Much pop art (such as Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans") is based on still life, but its true subject is most often the commodified image of the commercial product represented rather than the physical still-life object itself. Roy Lichtenstein's Still Life with Goldfish Bowl (1972) combines the pure colours of Matisse with the pop iconography of Warhol. Wayne Thiebaud's Lunch Table (1964) portrays not a single family's lunch but an assembly line of standardized American foods.[72]

The Neo-dada movement, including Jasper Johns, returned to Duchamp's three-dimensional representation of everyday household objects to create their own brand of still-life work, as in Johns' Painted Bronze (1960) and Fool's House (1962).[73] Avigdor Arikha, who began as an abstractionist, integrated the lessons of Piet Mondrian into his still lifes as into his other work; while reconnecting to old master traditions, he achieved a modernist formalism, working in one session and in natural light, through which the subject-matter often emerged in a surprising perspective.



Twentieth-century paintingsEdit

21st centuryEdit

A completely synthetic, computer generated still life, 2006 (by Gilles Tran)


See alsoEdit


  1. ^ Langmuir, 6
  2. ^ Langmuir, 13–14
  3. ^ Langmuir, 13–14 and preceding pages
  4. ^ Book XXXV.112 of Natural History
  5. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 19
  6. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p.22
  7. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p.137
  8. ^ a b Ebert-Schifferer, p. 16
  9. ^ a b Ebert-Schifferer, p. 15
  11. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p.25
  12. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 27
  13. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 26
  14. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 39, 53
  15. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 41
  16. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 31
  17. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 34
  18. ^ Slive, 275; Vlieghe, 211–216
  19. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 45
  20. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 47
  21. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p.38
  22. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, pp. 54–56
  23. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 64
  24. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 75
  26. ^ Books.google.co.uk, translation
  27. ^ Slive 277–279
  28. ^ Vlieghe, 207
  29. ^ Slive, 279, Vlieghe, 206-7
  31. ^ Taylor, p. 129
  32. ^ Taylor, p. 197
  33. ^ Taylor, pp. 56–76
  34. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 93
  36. ^ Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms: Pronkstilleven
  37. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 90
  38. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 164
  39. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 170
  40. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, pp. 180–181
  41. ^ See Juan van der Hamen.
  42. ^ Zuffi, p. 260
  44. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 71
  46. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 82
  47. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 84
  48. ^ Stefano Zuffi, Ed., Baroque Painting, Barron's Educational Series, Hauppauge, New York, 1999, p. 96, ISBN 0-7641-5214-9
  49. ^ Zuffi, p. 175
  50. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 173
  51. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 229
  52. ^ Zuffi, p. 288, 298
  53. ^ a b c d Michel 1960, p. i
  54. ^ Berman 2003
  55. ^ a b Michel 1960, p. ii
  56. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 287
  57. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 299
  58. ^ a b Ebert-Schifferer, p. 318
  59. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 310
  60. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 260
  61. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 267
  62. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 272
  63. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 321
  64. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, pp. 323–4
  65. ^ Stefano Zuffi, Ed., Modern Painting, Barron's Educational Series, Hauppauge, New York, 1998, p. 273, ISBN 0-7641-5119-3
  66. ^ a b Ebert-Schifferer, p. 311
  67. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 338
  69. ^ David Piper, p. 635
  70. ^ Piper, p. 639
  71. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 387
  72. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, pp. 382–3
  73. ^ Ebert-Schifferer, p. 384-6


  • Berman, Greta. “Focus on Art”. The Juilliard Journal Online 18:6 (March 2003)
  • Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Still Life: A History, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998, ISBN 0-8109-4190-2
  • Langmuir, Erica, Still Life, 2001, National Gallery (London), ISBN 1857099613
  • Michel, Marianne Roland. "Tapestries on Designs by Anne Vallayer-Coster." The Burlington Magazine 102: 692 (November 1960): i-ii
  • Slive, Seymour, Dutch Painting, 1600–1800, Yale University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-300-07451-4
  • Vlieghe, Hans (1998). Flemish Art and Architecture, 1585–1700. Yale University Press Pelican history of art. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07038-1

External linksEdit