She was in Suriname for two years, painting butterflies, moths, their relationships with plants and their lifecycles, but had to return early with malaria.
still life
She set out to investigate, document and paint the lifecycles of butterflies and moths at a time when most thought they arose spontaneously.
Until the seventeenth century, still life paintings were occasional curiosities, From the Romans and Hans Memling to the early Dutch Golden Age the genre developed steadily.
After his severe stroke, Lovis Corinth used still lifes to learn to paint with his right hand. Charles Demuth found solace in them when recovering from acute diabetic complications.
Throughout his forty-year artistic career, he made a successful living not from painting the enigmatic group portraits for which he’s now famous, but floral still lifes.
For William Merritt Chase, they were initially a good way of raising money. Later they turned into performance art when he used them as demonstrations for his students.
Specialising in still life piled high with dead game, his paintings may now seem horrific. They so inspired Goethe that he dedicated a poem to them.
To see his art, look not at Fantin’s groups of human figures, but at these crowds of flowers and fruit.
He seems to have painted continuously up to his death in 1904, but paintings quite unlike before. And why his huge collection of photos of nude models?
His last large group portrait features eight men who gathered to enjoy the music of Wagner. Why are they all looking in different directions, though?
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