Ancient antecedents

Still life paintings often adorn the interior of ancient Egyptian tombs. It was believed that food objects and other items depicted there would, in the afterlife, become real and available for use by the deceased. Ancient Greek vase paintings also demonstrate great skill in depicting everyday objects and animals. Similar still life, more simply decorative in intent, but with realistic perspective, have also been found in the Roman wall paintings and floor mosaics unearthed at Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villa Boscoreale, including the later familiar motif of a glass bowl of fruit. Decorative mosaics termed “emblema”, found in the homes of rich Romans, demonstrated the range of food enjoyed by the upper classes, and also functioned as signs of hospitality and as celebrations of the seasons and of life. By the 16th century, food and flowers would again appear as symbols of the seasons and of the five senses. Also starting in Roman times is the tradition of the use of the skull in paintings as a symbol of mortality and earthly remains, often with the accompanying phrase Omnia mors aequat . These vanitas images have been re-interpreted through the last 400 years of art history, starting with Dutch painters around 1600.

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 life-like objects, history’s earliest descriptions of trompe l’oeil painting. As Pliny the Elder recorded in ancient Roman times, Greek artists centuries earlier were already advanced in the arts of portrait 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 of many other artists.”

Beyond

The first four decades of the twentieth century formed an exceptional period of artistic ferment and revolution. Avant-garde movements rapidly evolved and overlapped in a march towards nonfigurative, total abstraction. The still life, as well as other representational art, continued to evolve and adjust until mid-century when total abstraction, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, eliminated all recognizable content.

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 the Nabi, including Pierre Bonnard and Edouard 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 in this period, especially flowers.

Henri Matisse reduced the rendering of still life objects even further to little more than bold, flat outlines filled with bright colors. He also simplifyied perspective and introducing multi-color backgrounds. In some of his still life paintings, such as Still Life with Eggplants, his table of objects is nearly lost amidst the other colorful patterns filling the rest of the room. Other exponents of Fauvism, such as Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain, further explored pure color and abstraction in their still life.