What Makes a Still Life Good?

Throughout art history, still life was often denigrated as a “lower” form of art. 17th-century Italian painter Andrea Sacchi, for instance, rated it behind landscape painting, and in the 18th century, Royal Academy founding president Joshua Reynolds ranked it lower than landscape, portraits, and history painting. The inanimate and sometimes predictable nature of its subjects—skulls, globes, weighty tomes, and lavish food—has, for centuries, left some art critics cold.

And yet, despite attempts to relegate still life to the lowest rung of artistic hierarchy, the genre is now a fundamental part of Western art history. Still life paintings remain, as Édouard Manet suggested, the “touchstone” of painting. Recently, the genre has been celebrated with increasing frequency in a slew of exhibitions. In 2022, the Louvre staged its monumental exhibition “Les Choses” (“The Things”), which created a dialogue between past and present artists working within the genre of still life. This year, art spaces across the globe, from the Hepworth Wakefield to Ben Brown Fine Arts and Gallery Henoch, have all followed suit, presenting newly vivid work by artists imbuing material life with universal and contemporary relevance.

Pallant House Gallery’s “The Shape of Things” is certainly the most comprehensive of these new shows—with 150 works by over 100 artists on display—but it is also the first major exhibition to consider the history of still life specifically in Britain. “What really struck me when interacting with works, both past and present, is how artists use still life as a vehicle to grapple with some of the most pressing and profound aspects of the human condition,” said the exhibition’s chief curator Melanie Vandenbrouck. “Birth, love, loss, joy, violence; it’s all there, projected onto the objects on the canvas.”

Simon Pietersz Verelst’s bittersweet bouquet painting Roses, morning glory and a carnation on a marble ledge with some grapes (ca. 1700), on view in the first room of the exhibition, is laden with symbolic meaning, conveying the bounty of God’s creation and the transience of life. Rose petals are on the cusp of wilting, leaves already blighted by the sun. Each element carries further meaning: Roses were symbolic of love and of the Virgin Mary, while carnations represented resurrection and eternal life.

Often, what makes these works so enduring is their capacity to offer the viewer a moment of rest. “By its nature, the genre is concerned with slow and close observation which gives the viewer an opportunity to pause,” Vandenbrouck said. “Contemporary artists are purposefully looking to the traditions of still life to reinvent it, push its boundaries, and still draw out this feeling.”

In the Pallant House show, Patrick Caulfield, an artist associated with the Pop Art generation of the 1960s, reconfigures imagery from a still-life painting by 17th-century painter Willem Kalf in the work Reserved Table (2000). Caulfield’s life-size painting is an abstract composition of a restaurant interior in which a lobster, rendered in vibrant photorealistic detail, rests on a pewter platter atop a crisp white tablecloth. By reinvigorating the formal traditions of the genre, Caulfield achieves his aim of “shocking with the familiar”: “I find that in treating different things in different ways, they become a point of focus,” the artist wrote in the publication Patrick Caulfield (2005). “It’s the idea that one doesn’t encompass everything, and that your eye can look around and see things.”

In much the same way that archaeologists excavate material remains, examining the timeline of the still-life genre represents an inquiry into human history. “For the past 130 years, artists have been using still life to make sense of the world around them,” said Vandenbrouck. “Each painting, sculpture, or installation is a historical touchstone, very much of its time. [In the exhibition], we see artists addressing themes of consumerism, injustice, migration, and much more.” Culture, as portrayed by the table, is arguably as responsive to history as any building or landscape. In 16th-century Dutch Golden Age painting, the inclusion of certain fruits like pineapples indicate the wealth and robust global trade networks of the Dutch Republic. The nuances of an object or artifact as it appears before us are the product of cultural and historical pressure.

In his archival inkjet print Still Life with Goblet (after Pieter de Ring, 1640–1669) (2017), British Chinese artist Gordon Cheung focuses on Dutch banquet and breakfast pieces to explore ties between historical socioeconomic systems, modern capitalism, and China’s recent power on the global stage. Cheung adapts open-source images of historical still-life paintings and applies a digital code that “glitches” the image. This aesthetic erodes the pristine imagery, leading it towards a state of pictorial chaos.

Vandenbrouck also noted that still lifes can express internal and external conflict, drawing on the example of Meredith Frampton’s disturbing assortment of objects in Trial and Error (1939), which evokes the social instability of the time. “Trial and Error is, in some ways, a traditional still life with its polished application of paint, truthful rendition of objects, and almost Neoclassical architecture,” said Vandenbrouck, “yet something feels off. The juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects—from a pear-topped urn to a roll of ribbon; a green ribbed glass poison bottle to artistic paraphernalia—hints at the discord and uncertainty of the era, whilst alluding to the fragility of life and the vicissitudes of existence.”

The anxiety of war is similarly explored by society portraitist and pioneer of color photography, Madame Yevonde. In the print Crisis (A.R.P)—taken just two days after the outbreak of World War II in 1939—the photographer muzzles a bust of Julius Caesar with a gas mask and sets it among the shedding petals of a red carnation: a somber forewarning of the bloodshed of war.

Beyond the critical act of the vanitas or memento mori, at its essence, still life painting is a celebration and elevation of the mundanity of inanimate objects. The genre pertains to what is often called rhopography, or the depiction of those things which lack importance. In the Pallant House show, emblems of interiorities and fragments of identity manifest in a set of dentures or a strewn silk scarf as in Dod Procter’s Black and White (1932). Elsewhere, a packet of cigarettes, cup of coffee, and the morning paper create the image of a kitchen table in Jann Haworth’s soft sculpture Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic (1962).

There is no better example of this elevation of the everyday than in the artistic efforts of the Post-Impressionists, with the likes of Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet, as well as artists associated with the Bloomsbury and Camden Town Groups. These artists portrayed humble domestic items, absent of symbolic meaning, simply arranged, and exploding with colour to achieve a kind of balance and unity.

In the second room of the Pallant House show, for example, hangs English painter Ursula Tyrwhitt’s Flowers (1912), a watercolor painting of a jug brimming with common English flowers. Tyrwhitt uses pattern, in the form of an incomplete tablecloth, and a distorted perspective to bring still life into a new age of modernism. Some years later, this focus would find its feet in the Social Realist movement, which used art to draw attention to the living conditions of everyday people. John Bratby’s Still Life with Chip Frier (1954), also on view, depicts a heaving table of abundance and disorder that departs from traditional representations of food found in still life. Instead, he features mass-produced goods such as a chip pan, used to cook fries, or a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

In many cases, painters of still-life works refuse the role of neutral observer, imbuing the central objects with a sense of intimacy and closeness, as if each possessed its own personality. Understanding still life in art doesn’t require expertise—it’s about appreciating the stories, meanings, and beauty embedded in everyday objects. “However insignificant they may seem, the life of objects reveals our own,” says Vandenbrouck. “They represent and contain us, as tangible fragments of ourselves.”

For example, in My Bottles and Pumps (2024), a new painting for “The Shape of Things,” Caroline Walker challenges the “low” status of her everyday personal objects. Portraying the breastfeeding apparatus drying on the kitchen sink, she elevates this female-coded act. “Walker is reclaiming the domestic space and offering a window into contemporary motherhood,” said Vandenbrouck.