What Is a Still Life? Painting Objects That Cannot Object

The Academy in France codified the ranking in the seventeenth century: history painting including religious and mythological subjects first, then portraiture, then scenes of everyday life, then landscape, and still life last. The logic was about invention, since a history painting required the artist to compose a scene from imagination and learning while a still life required only accurate observation of what was in front of them. The consequences were practical: the genre was less prestigious, paid less, and was frequently the work of specialists and of women, who were excluded from the life drawing classes that history painting required and were therefore steered toward flowers and objects. Several of the finest practitioners were women whose reputations suffered accordingly, including Rachel Ruysch, whose flower paintings sold for more than Rembrandt's work in her lifetime, and Clara Peeters, who painted her own reflection into the polished surfaces of the vessels she depicted.

The genre's first great period is the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and it grew from a specific set of conditions. A Protestant republic had no market for religious images, a merchant class with money bought paintings for private houses, and a system of open art markets rewarded specialisation. Painters produced recognised subcategories, each a saleable type:

• •Flower pieces, combining species that never bloom in the same season, painted from studies over months and therefore impossible arrangements presented as observation
• •Breakfast pieces and banquet pieces, ranging from a herring and a roll to laden tables of silver, lemons and glass, which display wealth and technical virtuosity together
• •Vanitas paintings, containing a skull, a guttering candle, a watch, soap bubbles or cut flowers, whose subject is the brevity of life and the worthlessness of possessions, painted for people who owned a great many possessions
• •Game pieces and kitchen pieces, and the trompe l'oeil arrangements designed to deceive the eye
• •A shared visual vocabulary in which objects carry meanings, so that a lemon peeled in a spiral is beauty with a bitter interior, an insect is decay, and an overturned glass is an interrupted life

Because the genre carried no narrative obligation, it became the natural site for investigating how painting works. Chardin in the eighteenth century painted ordinary kitchen objects with an attention that made the subject almost irrelevant and the paint itself the event. Cezanne spent decades on apples, deliberately breaking single-point perspective by drawing different objects from slightly different viewpoints within one picture, tilting tabletops forward and treating the canvas as a constructed surface rather than a window, which is the direct foundation of what followed. Cubism began with still life for exactly this reason, since a guitar or a bottle could be analysed from several angles without anyone complaining about likeness, and the first collages were made from newspaper and wallpaper glued onto still life compositions. Morandi painted the same few bottles and jars for forty years. The genre's low status was its advantage: a painter could do something unprecedented to a jug and nobody's dignity was at stake.

The European hierarchy is not universal. Chinese painting treats birds and flowers as a major category with a long theoretical literature, and bamboo, plum blossom and chrysanthemum carry established meanings, with the emphasis on brushwork and on capturing a quality rather than an appearance. Japanese and Korean traditions developed related practices. Islamic and Persian manuscript painting handled objects within narrative settings. In the twentieth century the genre absorbed everything: cubist papier colle, surrealist juxtapositions, the consumer packaging of pop art, photorealism, and the found object presented as sculpture, which is arguably the logical endpoint of painting objects. Photography took the tradition up immediately and continues it in advertising and food photography, which is a vast commercial application of exactly the seventeenth-century skills of lighting, arrangement and surface description, produced for the same purpose of making goods desirable.

European academies ranked still life last because it required observation rather than invention, which pushed it toward specialists and toward women excluded from life drawing, and which also freed it from narrative obligation. Dutch seventeenth-century painters developed saleable subcategories including flower pieces with impossible seasonal combinations and vanitas arrangements about mortality painted for wealthy owners. That freedom made the genre the site of the most radical experiments in modern painting, since Cezanne could dismantle perspective on a table of apples without anyone objecting.