1: Dutch Golden Age with Heda and Peeters

[Click image for larger version.]

Willem Claeszoon Heda

Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie, c. 1631
Oil on oak panel, w82 cm x h54 cm (32.38" x 21.26")

Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany

[Second piece below write-up.]

REFRESHER:

I want to talk more about these kinds of works in a full-length post (or several) in future, so trying to be brief for today. 

Dutch Golden Age¹ painting opens up whole new worlds of photorealistic effects via tight focus on easily-recognized objects, with a special innovation in the arena of 'breakfast' or 'banquet' paintings. Still life paintings from this era are almost uniformly moralistic; they are meant to remind the viewer to e.g. moderate in all things, or that the material world fades. 

But watching painters, of all people, comment on the triviality of the physical world is always so fascinating, because it's almost by necessity an exercise in ambivalence. 

If you haven't already, click through to one of the paintings on this page and pore over it up close. It is indeed possible that a deeply religious individual could paint a still life that detailed, and be thinking the whole time about what *is* permanent, a spiritual world beyond the rotting physical realities we live in. But how do you paint like that without *also* being deeply in love with physical reality? You can't have focus that obsessive without getting a buzz off the look of light on glass, or the texture of food, or the feel of the paint manipulated under your hands. So yes, it all passes away, but the artist paints this way because they don't want it to. And yet it's not hypocrisy, because both sides are deeply, authentically believed in².

And so the conflict ends up in the painting, and that tension is what makes them endure.

[Click image for larger version - note tiny self-portrait on lid of jug³.]

Clara Peeters⁴

Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, c. 1615

Oil on panel, w49.5 cm x h34.5 cm (19.5" x 13.6") 

Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands

NOTES:

1. The Dutch Golden Age pulled in artists from the Netherlands, Flanders, and the surrounding areas, and these other areas also had their own artistic episodes under other names. Just wanted to be clear that there are differences between 'Dutch', 'Flemish', 'Northern', etc.

2. Just wanted to point out that even without religious reasons to acknowledge mortality, or the impermanence/'unimportance' of the physical world, still life artists always have a visceral understanding of that sort of thing anyway. When you set up a still life, you're already faced with the infinite variety of small moves (a fruit bowl nudged here or there, a cup shifted a cm this way or that) that change the whole composition — and once you've got it set up, it's a fight to keep everything in place. And the LIGHTING, which flickers in and out and changes EVERYTHING with each little move of a shadow or brightening of a color, and you feel like you're going blind trying to keep up with this two-foot-square kaleidoscope. And then you have to remember that these artists only had *actual* food and other perishables to work with, so they were in a constant race against time to make these paintings as they watched their subject literally decay in front of them. I have never been so deeply aware of the world's constant flux as when working on still life, and that transience does make you feel like physical details are unimportant even as you're chasing them down. So, again, that's what you get — a genuine belief that this random arrangement of materials doesn't really matter, even as you're getting blissfully drunk on all the visual specifics and are genuinely in love with that too.

3. Another reason to suspect ambivalence: still life painters are highly likely to include little signatures worked into their paintings (see the corner of napkin in the Heda painting or the knife in Peeters'), and also among the most likely to include little self-portraits in their works. No matter what other purpose these touches might serve, they're a definite reflection of personal pride. 

4. Just so you've seen a still life from the 'dead animal' category, Clara Peeters is also responsible for one of the first 'dead game birds' paintings, a theme that would become very popular over the century and expand to other dead animals such as fish or deer. Click the nastiness below for more details and a closer look. 

Bodegon, c. 1611