Before about 1870, no one questioned that cast shadows should appear grey, without any change in colour. The Impressionists disagreed.
Chardin
After the Disaster Year of 1672, the art market collapsed. Dutch artists reverted to the more traditional, but their impact on secular themes, and genres including landscapes and still life has endured.
Tuna fishing in Spain, goldfish sold as pets or in a Berlin flat, underwater with a diver, and in many still lifes, including those of William Merritt Chase, the master of fish.
Maids toiling at food preparation and washing clothes in the sculleries and utility rooms in the basement. Among them is Vermeer’s Milkmaid, and some of Degas’ working women.
From Dürer’s groundbreaking hare to the fable of the hare and the tortoise, a hidden hare in a well-known Turner and a white rabbit for the first of the month?
Telling a story using shadows, and the nineteenth century controversy over the colour of shadows.
An unusual but apparently addictive theme for still life paintings: fish, from Chardin’s ray to the performative art of William Merritt Chase.
A parrot, coral, snuffed-out candles, human skulls, worn-out boots, a bottle of poison and a syringe: all objects in still life paintings.
Four centuries of paintings of tables laid up ready for the consumption of food, with several variations. From Clara Peeters to the modern burger.
With the Rococo in full swing, still life painting was left in the hands of the popular eccentric Chardin, and the brilliant Anne Vallayer-Coster.
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