This article is about Still Life (or still lifes as plural), the art form. For other uses of the phrase, see Still Life (disambiguation).

A still life is a work of art depicting inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, plants and natural substances like rocks) or man-made (drinking glasses, cigarettes, pipes, hotdogs and so on) in an artificial setting. Art refers to a diverse range of Human activities creations and expressions that are appealing to the Senses or Emotions of a human individual Popular in Western art since the 17th century, still life paintings give the artist more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture. Painting (pān'tīng in Art, is the practice of applying Color to a Surface (support base such as e For the art of designing external spaces see Landscape architecture. A portrait is a painting, photograph, Sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person in which the face and its expression is predominant

History

Transparent bowl of fruit and vases. Roman wall painting in Pompeii (around 70 AD)

Still life paintings often adorn the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. Ancient Rome was a Civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC Pompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples and Caserta in the Italian region of Campania, in Ancient Egypt was an Ancient Civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now It was believed that food objects and other items depicted there would, in the afterlife, become real and available for use by the deceased. Similar paintings, more simply decorative in intent, have also been found in the Roman frescoes unearthed at Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villa Boscoreale. Ancient Rome was a Civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC Fresco (plural either frescos or frescoes) is any of several related Painting types done on Plaster on walls or Pompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples and Caserta in the Italian region of Campania, in Herculaneum (in modern Italian Ercolano) is an ancient Roman town located in the territory of the current commune of Ercolano. Villa Boscoreale is an ancient Roman villa located in the town of Boscoreale, about two kilometers outside Pompeii in Campania, southern Some Roman wall paintings already depict the later familiar motif of a glass bowl of fruit. The popular appreciation of still life painting as a demonstration of the artist's skill is related in the ancient Greek legend of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The term ancient Greece refers to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca Zeuxis (Ζεύξις (of Heraclea) and Parrhasius (Παρράσιος (of Ephesus and later Athens) were Painters who

Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, still life in Western art was mainly used as an adjunct to Christian religious subjects. The Renaissance (from French Renaissance, meaning "rebirth" Italian: Rinascimento, from re- "again" and nascere This was particularly true in the work of Northern European artists, whose fascination with highly detailed optical realism and disguised symbolism led them to lavish great attention on the meanings of various props and settings within their paintings' overall message. Painters such as Jan van Eyck often used objects, such as those considered still life elements, as part of an iconographic program. Jan van Eyck or Johannes de Eyck (jɑn vɑn ɛik (before c 1395 &ndash before July 9, 1441) was an Early Netherlandish painter active Iconography is the branch of Art history which studies the identification description and the interpretation of the content of images

Still life after 1600

Abraham van Beyeren, Banquet Still Life, ca. Abraham Hendriksz van Beijeren (ca 1620 The Hague - March 1690 Rotterdam) was a Dutch Baroque era painter. 1660, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also known as LACMA, is an Art museum in Los Angeles County California.

Still life painting thrived in Italy during the early Baroque^[1], yet it remained historically less respected than "grand manner" painting of historical, religious, and mythic subjects. Italy (Italia officially the Italian Republic, (Repubblica Italiana is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest Baroque art redirects here Please disambiguate such links to Baroque painting, Baroque sculpture, etc Prominent Academicians of the early 1600s, like Andrea Sacchi, felt that genre and still life painting did not carry the "gravitas" merited for painting to be considered great. Andrea Sacchi ( November 30 1599 - June 21 1661) was an Italian painter of High Baroque Classicism active in A genre (ˈʒɑːnrə also /ˈdʒɑːnrə/ from French "kind" or "sort" from Latin: genus (stem gener-) is a loose set On the other hand, successful Italian still life artists found ample patronage in their day^[2]. One additional fact is that before the 17th century, women painters, few as they were, commonly chose or were restricted to painting topics such as still lifes^[3].

Still life came into its own in the new artistic climate of the Netherlands in the 17th century (with the name stilleven: still life is a calque while Romance languages tend to use terms such as dead nature). The Netherlands ( Dutch:, ˈnedərlɑnt is the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which consists of the Netherlands the Netherlands While artists 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. Dutch Reformed Church (in Dutch: Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk or NHK was one of many branches of churches coming out of the Protestant Reformation in Europe

Juan Sánchez Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602, San Diego Museum of Art. Juan Sánchez Cotán ( June 25 1560 – September 8 1627)was a Spanish Baroque painter a pioneer of realism in Spain.

Especially popular in this period were vanitas paintings, in which sumptuous arrangements of fruit and flowers, or lavish banquet tables with fine silver and crystal, were accompanied by symbolic reminders of life's impermanence. In the arts vanitas is a type of symbolic Still life Painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the 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. An hourglass, also known as a sandglass, sand timer or sand clock, is a device for the measurement of Time. Often some of the fruits and flowers themselves would be shown starting to spoil or fade. The popularity of vanitas paintings, and of still life generally, soon spread from Holland to Flanders and from there to Spain^[4] and France. Flanders (Vlaanderen Flandre Flandern is a geographical region located in parts of present day Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. Spain () or the Kingdom of Spain (Reino de España is a country located mostly in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. This article is about the country For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic France topics.

Still life painting in Spain, also called bodegones, was austere; it differed from the Dutch still parallels, which often contain both rich banquets surrounded by ornate and luxurious items of fabric or glass. The term Bodega in Spanish can mean "pantry" or "tavern" or wine vault. The game 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 a surrealist air. Even while both Dutch and Spanish still lifes often had an embedded moral purpose, the austerity, which some find akin to a hair shirt fashion or the bleakness of some of the Spanish plateaus, appears to reject the sensual pleasures, plenitude, and luxury of Dutch still life paintings.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Ray, 1728, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin ( November 2, 1699 &ndash December 6, 1779) was an 18th-century French painter. The Louvre Museum (Musée du Louvre located in Paris is the world's most visited art museum a historic monument and a national museum of France

The French aristocracy of the 18th century also employed artists to execute paintings of bounteous and extravagant still life subjects, this time without the moralistic vanitas message of their Dutch predecessors. The Rococo love of artifice led to a rise in appreciation for trompe l'oeil (French: "trick the eye") painting, a type of still life in which objects are shown life-sized, against a flat background, in an attempt to create the illusion of real three dimensional objects in the viewer's space. Rococo is a style of 18th century French art and Interior design. Trompe-l'œil, which can also be spelled without the hyphen in English ( French: "trick the eye" tʁɔ̃p lœj is an Art technique involving extremely

With the rise of the European Academies, most notably the Académie française which held a central role in Academic art, and their formalized approach to artistic training, still life began to fall from favor. L'Académie française, or the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. Academic art is a style of Painting and Sculpture produced under the influence of European academies or universities The Academies taught the doctrine of "Hierarchy of genres" (or "Hierarchy of Subject Matter"), which held that a painting's artistic merit was based primarily on its subject. A hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different types of Genres in an art-form in terms of their value Artistic merit is an English language term that is used in relation to cultural products when referring to the judgment of their perceived quality or value as works of art 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. History painting, as formulated in 1667 by André Félibien, a historiographer architect and theoretician of French Classicism, was in the Hierarchy

Modern still life painting

Sunflowers or Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (August 1888) - National Gallery, London, England

It was not until the decline of the Academic hierarchy in Europe, and the rise of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, who emphasized technique and design over subject matter, that still life was once again avidly practiced by artists. Impressionism was a 19th-century Art movement that began as a loose association of Paris -based Artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and Art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Henri Fantin-Latour is known almost exclusively for his still lifes. Henri Fantin-Latour ( January 14, 1836 - August 25, 1904) was a French painter and lithographer. Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" are some of the best known 19th century still life paintings, and Paul Cézanne found in still life the perfect vehicle for his revolutionary explorations in geometric spatial organization.

Georges Braque, Violin and Candlestick, 1910, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Georges Braque ( May 13, 1882 &ndash August 31, 1963) was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ( SFMOMA) is a major Modern art Museum and San Francisco Landmark.

Indeed, Cézanne's experiments can be seen as leading directly to the development of Cubist still life in the early 20th century. Cubism was a 20th century Avant-garde Art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European Between 1910 and 1920, Cubist artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris painted many still life compositions, often including musical instruments, as well as creating the first Synthetic Cubist collage works, such as Picasso's "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912). Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso (October 25 1881 &ndash April 8 1973 Georges Braque ( May 13, 1882 &ndash August 31, 1963) was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor José Victoriano González-Pérez ( March 23, 1887 – May 11, 1927) better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish A collage (From the coller to glue is a work of formal art primarily in the Visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms thus creating a new whole

Artists in the United States, largely unburdened by Academic strictures on subject matter, had long found a ready market for still life painting. Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), eldest son of Revolutionary era painter Charles Willson Peale, was the first American still life specialist, and established a tradition of still life painting in Philadelphia that continued until the early 20th century, when artists such as William Harnett and John Frederick Peto gained fame for their trompe l'oeil renderings of collections of worn objects and scraps of paper, typically shown hanging on a wall or door. Raphaelle Peale, sometimes as Raphael Peale (February 17 1774 – March 25 1825is considered the first professional American painter of Still-life. Charles Willson Peale ( April 15, 1741 – February 22, 1827) was an American painter, soldier and naturalist Philadelphia (ˌfɪləˈdɛlfiə William Michael Harnett ( August 10, 1848 &ndash October 29, 1892) was an Irish - American painter who practiced John Frederick Peto ( May 21 1854 – November 23 1907) was an American Trompe l'oeil ("fool the eye" Trompe-l'œil, which can also be spelled without the hyphen in English ( French: "trick the eye" tʁɔ̃p lœj is an Art technique involving extremely

When 20th century American artists became aware of European Modernism, they began to interpret still life subjects with a combination of American realism and Cubist-derived abstraction. Modernism describes an array of Cultural movements rooted in the changes in Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ashcan School American realism was a turn of the century idea in art music and literature that showed through these different types of work reflections of the time period Typical of the American still life works of this period are the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley, and the photographs of Edward Weston. Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15 1887—March 6 1986 was an American Artist She is associated with the American Southwest where she found artistic inspiration Stuart Davis ( December 7, 1894 &ndash June 24, 1964) was an early American modernist painter. Marsden Hartley (January 4 1877 - September 2 1943 was an American Modernist painter and poet in the early 20th century Edward Henry Weston ( March 24 1886 &ndash January 1 1958) was an American photographer, and co-founder

A completely synthetic, computer generated still life. Computer graphics are Graphics created by Computers and more generally the Representation and Manipulation of Pictorial Data

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. Pop Art is a visual Art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in the United States. For the song by David Bowie, see Andy Warhol (song. Andrew Warhola (August 6 1928 &ndash February 22 1987 known as Andy Warhol The rise of Photorealism in the 1970s reasserted illusionistic representation, while retaining some of Pop's message of the fusion of object, image, and commercial product. Photorealism is the genre of painting based on making a painting of a Photograph. Typical in this regard are the paintings of Don Eddy and Ralph Goings. Don Eddy (born November 4, 1944) in Long Beach California is an American painter who gained initial fame as a Photorealist artist Ralph Goings ( May 9, 1928 in Corning California) is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement

References

See also

• Still life photography