Lowest of the low?

In 1648 the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) decided to classify five hierarchies of genre (or type) in painting.

Still life was ranked the lowest – behind history painting, portraiture, landscape, and scenes from daily life (which is usually called genre painting in art history).

Their reasoning behind what we might see today as quite a snobbish judgement was that still life did not include human subjects – and therefore could be understood with little intellectual effort.

Why still life art was disrespected, and how it's endured

Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some men came up with a hierarchy of painting for the art world that put still life at the very bottom. But for some reason, it's stuck around – for the entire history of visual art.

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Dutch Golden Age

Many Dutch and Flemish artists during the Northern Renaissance depicted tables brimming with fruit, bread and dead game – as well as more indulgent items such as lobster and wine as a sign of Dutch prosperity in the seventeenth century.

At this time, floral still lifes by artists such as Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum were especially fashionable, as was the ‘vanitas’ or ‘memento mori’.

This type of painting incorporated symbols such as skulls or a tumbling lemon peel to highlight the fragility of life – seen in the work of Pieter Claesz. and Harmen van Steenwyck.

French artists take on the mantle

Still life became popular in France from the eighteenth century, with Anne Vallayer-Coster and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin regarded as masters of the genre. The impact of seventeenth-century Dutch painting is especially clear in Chardin's naturalistic flower paintings.

Henri Fantin-Latour continued this focus on flowers – especially roses – in the nineteenth century, while his contemporary, Édouard Manet, was more drawn to foodstuffs such as fish and ham in his celebration of daily life.

Manet's fellow Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir also painted still lifes, often featuring peaches, throughout his career.

Still life in the modern world

Perhaps no artists bouquets are more famous than Vincent van Gogh's sunflowers, which are an example of how he used a single colour to transform the still life genre.

Modern artists, such as that other post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne, used everyday objects to experiment with form or perspective. The genre also impacted the increasingly abstract work of twentieth-century Cubist artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

The still life appears frequently in modern British art, not least in the table-top works of Ben Nicholson, and in vibrant paintings by Vanessa Bell, Gwen John, and Mary Fedden.

Throughout the 1960s, Pop artists such as Richard Hamilton and Patrick Caulfield examined still life in the context of contemporary life and consumerist culture, while the genre has remained essential to the work of David Hockney.