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Still Life with Strawberries, Painted Circa 1880 Giclee Print Degas, Edgar 24 in. x 18 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted Like landscape painting still-life was late to develop in Europe as an independent art. In Chinese and Japanese painting, however, the still-life held an important place from a very early period. Flower and bamboo studies formed a prominent branch of Chinese painting already by the Ch'in period ( A. D. 265-420).
Though these stilllifes were often related to poetry, they were fundamentally preoccupied with the purely painterly qualities of rhythm and linear design. Greek and Roman mosaics show understanding of the decorative possibilities of still-life painting. The subjects chosen by the painters of Antiquity appear to have consisted of horns of abundance, festoons of fruits and flowers and designs composed of insects, butterflies and snails.
Much of this decorative convention was inherited by the Italians, but with them still-life, like landscape, was subordinated to the principal theme of the picture and the primarily religious purpose of their work. Still-life plays a very great part in Crivelli's paintings. Though religion provided the excuse for his pictures, their most vital interest lies in the extraordinary precision and intensity with which he painted canopies of fruits and flowers, pots and domestic utensils.
As enthusiasm for the human figure began to wane with the approaching decadence of the Italian schools, the still-life detail encroached more powerfully upon the canvas space. Caravaggio produced several examples of independent still-life -- an elaborate painting of flowers. Luca Barbieri executed a painting of a dead fish, another of dead game and one of a basketful of flowers, and Paolo Antonio Barbieri painted huge piles of animals, comestibles, fruits and flowers, which entirely overwhelm the landscapes in which they are set.
In Spanish painting still-life often plays an important role. Velasquez lavished all his technical skill, feeling for texture and colour, and sense of design on the stilllife groups which take so prominent a place in his compositions. Later, Goya painted a few astonishing independent still-lifes, among them a study of dead game in the Prado, which must have exercised considerable influence on Manet.
It was, however, in Holland and in Flanders in the 17th century that the art of still-life was first most fully developed for its own sake. The Dutch and Flemish painters were inspired by no other motive than to render as meticulously as possible what they saw before them. Among Dutch and Flemish masters of still-life may be mentioned the Van Huysums, De Heem, Heda, Kalf, Bosschaert, Snyders, Van Aelst and Walscapelle. The works of these painters are on the whole more remarkable for their verisimilitude than for their concern with aesthetic problems.
In France the first most notable still-life painter was Chardin, who delighted in the colour and texture of fruit, in the various ways in which the dark flask, the thick tumbler and the half-cut loaf might be composed, and in the design made by simply folded napery and sparkling porcelain. Fantin-Latour painted flowers with delicacy, but with too great naturalism and too little interest in formal values. The Impressionists, preoccupied with the play of light and atmosphere, did not often paint still-life. Manet's attempts reflect his study of the Spanish masters.
A few pictures by Monet and Renoir, however, of both flowers and fruits, show the grace and poetry with which the impressionist technique might be applied to still-life subjects. Van Gogh's intense and asymmetrically composed still-lifes and Gauguin's flat, decorative treatment and brilliant colouring both show in different ways the influence of the Orient, particularly of the Japanese colour print. In Cézanne's monumental still-lifes, this genre reaches its highest expression. The problems of form, colour and design are here the painter's exclusive study.
In England, where literary interests have always predominated, the art of still-life was not much cultivated for its own sake before the present century, and the work of recent times both in France and in England stems from Cézanne and the Impressionists. Still-life has passed through all the various phases of abstraction, which sprang from Cézanne's simplifications of natural forms, providing the main theme for the dignified decorative designs of Juan Gris and Braque; and still-life has inspired painters like Bonnard or Matthew Smith in their richly textured and painterly works.
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