Original subtitles

One thing modern life is not short of is imagery.

We are bombarded by the fast-cut,

quick-moving symbols of advertising and media.

It's everywhere we look.

But the story of still life is not about looking,

it's about seeing.

Still life asks us to stop and consider the world anew.

Our impulse to take pleasure in the simple things of everyday life

stretches back into the depth of time.

Throughout history, artists have used still life to help us

understand the beauty of nature...

..and value the material world we have created around us.

The story of still life is an astonishing tale

of how the depiction of humble things

was relegated to the bottom of art's hierarchy...

..yet rose to play the key role

in some of art's most revolutionary moments.

And today, it lives on in unexpected ways.

Almost anything has got aesthetic qualities.

There are many more beautiful things than

we give credence to in our day-to-day lives.

When we think about what happiness really entails,

it often is about an appreciation of the moment,

and of things that are right in front of our eyes,

and things that are, in a way, quite ordinary.

And still life helps us with that.

In a way, still life is the most demanding genre of art to take

seriously because it doesn't have any of the obvious signs of importance.

How artists depict the world helps us to decide what

we think of as valuable, and what we neglect and demean.

The story of this intriguing genre is intertwined with religion,

politics and wealth.

Depicting a mere object might seem the simplest

and most obvious form of art.

But it's a practice the greatest names

have always been drawn towards.

But how do you define it?

What actually constitutes a work of still life?

The four basic elements that an artist is going to be

looking for when they are composing a still life is that, first,

they are going to choose their objects,

then they are going to place them in space -

because the space is just as important as the object,

and then they are going to consider their lighting,

and last of all, they will think about the framing, how the

total composition actually works within the height

and width of the finished image.

It's a painting of everything within arm's reach.

It's everything that's touchable,

it's everything that you could lift with your hand.

It's about a manual, and gestural space.

One peculiarity of still life painting is that, by and large,

the world stops at the far edge of the table, it just ends.

You do not even ask why. It is so cleverly done, you don't

even think... "They're censoring this,

"what have they got beyond the table?"

It's far more interested in the tactile world,

and the interplay between things that you... Dare I touch this glass?

Things that you lift and are used to, and you get

so used to that you don't see them any more.

So, one of the things that European still life gets into is,

supposing this is about the objects that are so familiar

and everyone's got them, so much so that you never look at them.

It's a sort of re-enchantment of the things that are overlooked,

that are so taken for granted that you don't see them any more.

Well, literally, a still life painting is

a painting of inanimate objects, but it clearly is not adequate

because any still life painting from the middle of the 17th century

is likely to have beetles and bugs and snails and live animals

so the term itself is only approximate.

During the Italian Renaissance,

the ancient city of Milan was one of the world's key centres of art

and learning. Among the many treasures still to be found here

is one deceptively simple painting that is of vital

importance in the story of still life.

We are in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

Its origins go back to the donation made by Cardinal Federico Borromeo

in 1618 when he decided to donate his private collection

in 1618 when he decided to donate his private collection

to the Ambrosiana,

thus founding the oldest museum in Milan.

Although the collection is not a huge collection as such,

nevertheless, we have amazing masterpieces.

The Pinacoteca has many very important masterpieces

but definitely, there is one which deserves special attention.

Here is the famous basket of fruit by Caravaggio

which is surely one of the most important pieces of our collection.

The painting is one of the most fascinating, beautiful,

enigmatic, important works of art, not only in the history

of still life painting but in the whole of European art.

It looks, for all the world, like a commonplace basket of fruit,

and yet it is painted with a realism, with an intensity,

a sense of detail, and immediacy that certainly is unparalleled.

And historically, of course, in this painting, Caravaggio has

painted the very first known still life painting of a basket of fruit.

When this work was first created, the people at that time had never

seen anything like it.

The basket of fruit is recognised

as the first major work of Western still life.

as the first major work of Western still life.

It was painted in 1596 by the infamous artist,

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

And by doing something seemingly obvious as depicting a simple

basket of fruit, Caravaggio had written a new chapter

in art history.

Caravaggio was a rather dark character, very ambitious

and when he was 21 he paints his only still life painting.

It's a basket of fruit that wants to be something else.

It wants to be a painting about life and death,

and resurrection and salvation and whether you can achieve such a thing.

Caravaggio is a man full of doubt

and I think that doubt is in that painting.

The forms that he makes are all extremely imperfect.

There isn't anything that hasn't been ravaged by a worm or a bug

There isn't anything that hasn't been ravaged by a worm or a bug

or some kind of foliage disease because Caravaggio loves things

when they are imperfect and damaged.

The symbolism in the painting is quite highly charged.

The apples are conspicuously worm-eaten

and they are meant to bring to mind, the apple from which Eve ate,

which condemned man to sin, death and time.

And their counterpoint is the vine leaves

which stand for Christ and they stand for the wine

that is Christ's blood that saves us from death.

The painting is about death, the worm-eaten apple and the hope for

eternal life divine,

and yet Caravaggio always leaves space for doubt.

Some of the vine leaves have begun to

wither and they seem almost to have turned into hands, gesturing,

reaching for salvation as if salvation isn't, in fact, certain.

And the whole basket of fruit teeters on the edge of the ledge as

if about to fall.

It's a picture that's got so much in embryo of what makes him

an extraordinary artist.

It's one of the great paintings in the world.

Caravaggio's still life resurrected one of the most popular and

fascinating of art's disciplines.

The impact of the work can only really be

understood in the context of what had come before.

With his humble subject, dedication to realism and sublime technique,

Caravaggio had revived a genre of painting lost since antiquity.

In ancient Egypt, large-scale tomb paintings have been discovered

that contain elements familiar to still life.

Again, Ancient Greek art also depicted simple objects that

point towards the genre.

But the finest examples of the ancient world's still life

wouldn't be revealed until a discovery in the mid-18th century.

From under the ash of Pompeii, early excavations of the site

uncovered 2,000-year-old Roman still life frescoes.

uncovered 2,000-year-old Roman still life frescoes.

There are interesting examples in Roman arts of paintings of fruit

and fish and water and jugs of wine,

and these are described as works of Xenia art.

Now, Xenia is a fantastic, ancient Greek word and means a kind of

guest-host friendship or the gifts that are given

between guests and hosts.

The Xenia paintings aren't just pretty things,

they are not just there to show off the skill of the artist,

they are not just there to show off the skill of the artist,

they had a job of work to do.

The Roman Empire is a massive place,

people are travelling the whole time, there's a huge trade in goods,

in ideas, there's a lot of political visits from diplomats,

and I think, in some ways, the Xenia paintings are saying to the

wider world, "we are a cosmopolitan society,

"we accept people who travel from foreign lands,

"and this is the kind of hospitality that you can expect from us."

These Xenia paintings are the clearest examples of ancient

still life that form a direct link

with the later tradition of European work.

Whoever painted this fresco was thinking in exactly the same way

as artists who would come later.

The subjects chosen are domestic. These are humble things.

There's a range of textures on display.

We can see a dialogue between the natural and the man-made.

Objects overhang the edge of the table, breaking the line,

emphasising perspective.

Even in the earliest work in the genre,

we can see defined rules of composition.

And there's another link between ancient Xenia

and still life we know today...

The direction of light.

So the first thing that I'm going to do is just move my hand very,

very loosely and expressively over the surface of the paper,

which is just making a first response to the shape and the texture

and the size and the weight of the subject.

Fairly soon,

I am going to be thinking about the lighting of it because I want this

to look three-dimensional and I am instinctively lighting from the left.

If you go to a national gallery and have a look at a broad spectrum

of still life, have a look at which direction the light is coming from.

And in the majority of paintings it is going to be

coming from the left-hand side.

coming from the left-hand side.

So here we have a classic example - Caravaggio's Basket Of Fruit.

And the light is very clearly coming from the left, we can see the

shadow just underneath the grapes, and also on this side of the basket.

From the left. From the left.

From the left.

From the left. From the left.

Perhaps it is to do with literacy.

The fact that in the West we are learning to read

and write, from infancy, we are dealing with text and the input

of written information from left to right, left to right, left to right.

It's almost as if the Western brain has been programmed to

take in information

and therefore to prefer the receipt of information from left to right.

It's in the Xenia frescoes discovered at Pompeii

we find all the emerging rules of still life.

The genre was pioneered within Roman visual culture,

but no matter how skilled the work or popular its appeal, still life

was destined to be considered the lowest form of art.

A fact one of Rome's greatest authors

and philosophers would be quick to point out.

Pliny the Elder was a Roman period author.

He worked and lived in the first century AD. Very prolific,

and his great work is the Natural History.

It's an extraordinary undertaking.

In a way, it is the world's first encyclopaedia.

And why this is so significant for us

is that there is a whole paragraph

devoted to a discussion of still life,

and whether still life is a higher or lower form of painting.

In a way, Pliny is the world's first art critic

because he's introducing a particular painter, called Peiraikos,

who is supposed to be a splendid artist, to have extraordinary talent,

and yet, as Pliny says, "the question is whether he debased himself

"because he chose to paint simple and base things,"

and he's actually got a fantastic Latin word to describe him.

He calls him a rhyparographos,

which means a painter of low and meanly things.

He was successful, as Pliny says here, he obtained great glory,

his work sold for a lot of money, and yet this is really

marginalising still life painting, this is saying, this is not

a higher form of the art, this is something which really is base.

Pliny's words would set the tone on how still life would now be rated.

It would be seen as vulgar,

less worthy than other supposedly superior genres.

To be practised by those artists of lower status.

But it wasn't just marginalisation that would be the issue.

When the Roman Empire fell, the art of still life would fall with it.

It would vanish.

THUNDER RUMBLES

Europe would now enter the medieval age

and there would be no place for painting ordinary objects.

The period commonly referred to as medieval,

it's over 1,000 years long.

It starts around the fall of Rome,

so about 400AD, and it continues right up until the Renaissance,

you could say up until 1500 AD.

But the defining characteristic of this period is

the rise of Christianity,

the all-pervasive impact of Christianity,

particularly on visual culture.

Christian painting had no place, really, for ordinary,

secular objects because it was always the higher world,

the heavenly world, the very radiant world.

If you get an artist who's simply painting bowls of oranges or

bunches of flowers, that is not really helping anyone, it is

not contributing to Christian society.

Still life doesn't actually exist in the medieval

period as a specific artistic genre.

You don't get objects in isolation,

they tend to function as symbols or attributes.

So, for example, the apple - if you saw a painting,

an image of an apple, the medieval mind would immediately start

connecting that with other narratives, other connections.

For example, Adam and Eve.

So, the apple would be a symbol of the fall from grace that Adam and Eve

undertake after having eaten the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

And if it was depicted in visual culture,

you wouldn't see just an apple by itself, you would have the apple and

then you would have Adam and Eve, the tree and the serpent as well.

The Catholic Church was the absolute force behind medieval art.

In biblical terms,

anything that glorified a mere object was strictly forbidden.

There were to be no graven images.

But one particular painting does take us

a step closer to the rehabilitation of still life.

This is Duccio's The Annunciation, painted over 700 years ago.

It contains Renaissance still life in embryo.

When the simplest things began to acquire a symbolic power...

all of their own.

"The Angel Gabriel was sent to a virgin

"and the virgin's name was Mary.

"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour with God and behold,

"thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son.

"And you will call his name, Jesus.

"And of his kingdom, there shall be no end."

I suppose one way of thinking about Christian art is that it was

a visual Bible for a largely illiterate population.

When the high art of the Middle Ages developed, it was not only

something that was beautiful for its own sake

but it would have an instrumental, educational value

so you would see the angel, and Mary devoutly, eyes down,

and listening to this solemn address, and consenting to do the will of God.

But there would be little interpretative tools in there,

and probably the classic one is the vase of lilies,

lilies being a sign of sexual innocence.

This is very loaded, very potent symbolism.

The object is still relegated in terms of its scale and

prominence within religious painting, but the item is growing

in symbolic power and it was this,

alongside a technical development in paint,

that would provide a launch-pad for the re-emergence of still life.

Up until now, all major art works used tempera.

This was a paint which used opaque egg yolk to bind pigment,

and it restricted what great artists could achieve.

It required small brushstrokes, dried quickly,

and had a dull matte finish.

It would take a new innovation to allow still life to grow

towards illusion.

That's where oil comes in.

As a relatively new binding medium, it does create a revolution,

if you like, in terms of what artists can show.

Housed at St Bavo Cathedral in Belgium is the first major

painting of the Renaissance to take full advantage of the new medium,

the Ghent Altarpiece from 1432.

Oil allowed artists to achieve greater virtuosity.

Compared to a generation before,

they could now paint with a new level of intense detail.

A mix of natural and man-made materials that would soon

become the mainstays of still life are all on display.

But now, it's almost as if you could hold the object in your hand.

With oil you can create much more depth and light and shadows

and contrasts between light and dark,

all things that are crucial to render all these materials properly.

I think the developments of oil painting is hugely

important for still life.

The early painters of oil, they took those small-scale

skills of being able to depict flowers and fruit.

Oil paint enabled them to take that on to the large scale

and they could create these wonderful effects.

Oil paint just gives this whole new life and...

light and sense of moisture and freshness to art.

By the 16th century,

the church continued to be the main commissioner of European art.

But now painters were depicting elements of still life with

a new sense of obsessive detail.

Artists' love affair with the ordinary stuff of life would grow

and grow until still life would begin masquerading

as religious work.

And there are no better examples of this bold artistic duplicity

than at the National Gallery in London.

In the Four Elements by Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer,

the artist has to satisfy the demands of the church,

so we find Jesus appearing to his disciples after the Resurrection.

The true prominence in the painting is given to a market scene,

teeming with details of fish.

The Son of God has been firmly pushed into the background.

Now we see Christ seated with Mary

and Martha after raising Lazarus from the dead.

But Beuckelaer has positioned Jesus away in the back room.

He's little bigger than the loaf of bread,

placed in the foreground, littered with elements of still life.

In a painting of the same Bible story by Spanish artist Velazquez,

we see the same ploy of inserting still life within religious works.

Again, the figure of Jesus.

But the fish, which are the symbol of Christianity,

are given more prominence than Christ himself.

After 1,000 years of being hidden from view,

still life has begun to climb out from behind the veil of religion.

Christianity has got a very odd relationship to still life

because from the one point of view, and indeed for centuries,

it wouldn't tolerate it.

There'd be no place in a world that wanted radiant golden heaven

around the saints and figures of the Bible.

There was going to be no place for the everyday.

But when still life does revive, it's revived through Christianity.

It rides on the coat-tails of Christianity.

By 1596, when Caravaggio finally painted The Basket Of Fruit,

he achieved something that no-one had seen in living memory.

He eliminated every obvious feature of grand religious narrative

and placed the sole focus on a humble, simple object.

He'd created a world without God.

Although he brought the genre out from the shadows,

Caravaggio would never paint another still life in his career.

Although his fruit basket is such a famous picture,

that's Caravaggio on the way up.

That's what he wants to leave behind, that kind of work.

He wants to paint human bodies in action.

By the early 1600s,

Caravaggio was being commissioned

to paint important religious pictures,

such as this painting of Christ and the disciples at Emmaus.

In other words,

he had become a major provider of pictures to the Catholic authorities,

applying the realism of his early years

to the business of depicting scenes from the Bible.

Caravaggio may have begun to focus on explicitly religious subjects...

..but he still finds space for an old friend.

The Basket Of Fruit has been here at the Ambrosiana

since the gallery opened in 1607.

It was added to the collection by the founder,

Cardinal Federico Borromeo.

Borromeo was a major collector of art during the Renaissance

and a key figure in the development of still life painting.

His love of The Basket Of Fruit

made him desire more works in a similar vein.

He began to commission other early still life works

from further afield.

If you go to Milan and you look at the Ambrosiana collection,

on the one hand you've got Caravaggio,

on the other hand you've got Raphael.

But then you've got huge amounts of Dutch still life painting.

This spectacular flower piece at the Ambrosiana

is by the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel.

As part of their studies,

Northern European artists like Brueghel

would make the pilgrimage south,

to soak up the influence of the masters of Italian art.

This was very important for artists to go there.

It was part of their training, their education.

And you do see influences on their work when they come back.

It has a huge impact on their style and development.

I think it's hardly surprising

that Northerners were drawn in particular to Caravaggio

and took these lessons back with them to the north

and became integral,

became rooted, embedded in the art of the north in the 1600s.

It was in Northern Europe

that still life would fulfil its potential

and, in particular,

tiny Holland that would provide the setting for a golden age.

I think it's incomparable what happened in Amsterdam,

especially in Amsterdam around 1600,

to see how this art market almost exploded,

all of a sudden.

It's amazing how fast still life spreads in Europe.

It really is a mass phenomenon.

By the 17th century,

Dutch painters returning from Italy

were coming home to a nation that had been revolutionised

by a political and religious storm -

the Protestant Reformation.

An iconoclastic rage swept the country,

transforming visual culture.

The extravagant Catholic art

that had dominated for over 1,000 years

was torn down, destroyed.

The Dutch had declared themselves a republic,

free from the influence of monarchy,

free from the Catholic Church.

A new Protestant merchant class wanted a different type of art.

Art that reflected a new world they'd created for themselves.

This is really secular painting.

It's almost the first era

of absolutely non-religious painting in the world.

And of course, the thing that's making that power of secularism

is the economy, what's happening with the economy.

The Dutch refer to the 17th century as their Golden Age.

And with good reason.

This small republic on the northern edge of Europe,

uncoupled from the church and monarchy,

used its freedom to transform itself

into an economic and cultural superpower.

They were quite simply

the richest nation on earth.

This is the 17th-century canal house of the Van Loon family,

the most influential of Amsterdam's merchants,

who weren't slow in enjoying their new affluence.

Their fabulous wealth,

like that of the nation,

was built on vast maritime trading networks

that spread across the globe.

The Dutch ships were trading all over the world.

And they were bringing in masses of stuff,

all sorts of materials and objects,

into the Netherlands and to the rest of Europe

which you also find in the still life paintings from the period.

So, you find Chinese porcelain...

..exotic flowers,

exotic fruit,

all that sort of thing.

In still life painting,

the Dutch work out their relationship to things.

the Dutch work out their relationship to things.

They're, in a way, the first consumer society.

So they are awash in plenty and in luxury goods.

The Dutch art market boomed

like no other market in Europe had boomed.

But it went with the idea that when you get wealth,

you should decorate your house, your home. It's the only other...

it's the only foyer for the display of wealth in the Netherlands

cos there isn't a court

and there isn't a church that's going to gobble up

the national surplus wealth. So it's in the home.

So the primary object of Dutch wealth is the paintings.

Dutch culture was unique in that

everybody was buying paintings.

You know, the postman was buying paintings.

The baker was buying paintings.

A baker owned several Vermeers.

This was art for everybody.

In these early decades of the 17th century,

millions of paintings must have been made.

millions of paintings must have been made.

So it was a fully new market.

A mass market for paintings on this scale

had never been seen anywhere in the world before.

Art became an industry.

And such was the craze for still life

that customer-savvy painters

began to develop mass production techniques

to satisfy the demand.

OK, this is a still life with dead game, from Franz Snyders.

Franz Snyders went to Italy for a short period

and after he came back,

he developed much more his own style.

So it was clearly

a very important visit for him.

So it's a very interesting piece,

in terms of studio practice.

Because when you look at this particular painting,

you can see there's big motifs of the roe deer, the boar,

the lobster on the plate,

the dead birds here and there,

fruit, vegetables -

everything is in there.

And if you look at other works by Snyders,

you find that these motifs have been used again and again.

We know by making a tracing of the deer

on transparent foil, melinex foil,

and then placed it on other paintings by Franz Snyders

showing the same motif.

And with small variations, very small variations,

it fit it quite well.

So the idea that a painter would sit

with this whole banquet here in front of him

is not really realistic.

In this case, Snyders would have drawings

of all these different motifs

and he would combine them into an interesting composition

and repeat that with different combinations for other paintings.

There was an incredibly demanding market

so they needed to produce quite large numbers of works

and this is an efficient way of creating new compositions.

Creating fictional compositions became commonplace.

Perhaps the perfect example

of Dutch artists foregoing reality in pursuit of striking composition

can be seen in their approach to nature,

with floral still life.

Looking at the flower paintings of the 17th century,

it's about bringing together

as many beautiful, rare and exotic examples of flowers

as you possibly could.

It's done purely for pictorial effect.

It's very much this anti-natural impulse.

And so what you are looking at is what humans do with nature,

not nature itself.

You find flower painting

where species that could not possibly exist in the same seasonal moment

are brought together in a kind of triumph of wealth and ownership.

I think what they are

is a kind of coded celebration

of the Dutch Republic's power and influence.

Because what you get is

you get these flowers from different parts of the world

in which the Dutch have been trading.

And yet, they're all in the same vase.

So what the vase of flowers expresses

is the extent, the global extent, of Dutch maritime trade.

That painting is a kind of...

"This is us."

It's a bouquet of power.

During the Golden Age,

fortunes could even be made in the flowers themselves.

And in particular, this new import from Asia.

Tulip mania, as it was called, saw the trade in tulip bulbs

become engulfed in crazed financial speculation,

sending prices soaring.

The bulb of a single tulip

could cost three times as much as a house.

So they were such rare and exotic plants

that no-one would cut them.

You wouldn't have tulips as cut flowers

in real life

because they were just too expensive and, you know,

you just would never do it.

In paintings, to see a whole bouquet of just tulips

was outrageous.

Displays of outrageous affluence took several forms

and were commonplace in Golden Age still life.

The Dutch were hungry for the prestige that went with consumption.

Another genre that's developed are banquet pieces

where you get tables not unlike this amazing table here

that are absolutely uninhibited displays

of maximum possession of wealth.

Lobster and crayfish are not normal foodstuffs in the Netherlands

and citrus fruit doesn't grow in the Netherlands.

It all has to be brought in

so it's a celebration of that kind of power

to bring together in one place all the luxury of the world.

As the genre matures,

you find that the scene of consumption, the scene of wealth,

it becomes increasingly barbarous.

Things are pushed over.

The whole table is sort of strewn with a kind of principle of litter.

It's wreckage. It's like destruction,

consumption as destruction.

At the same time, it's a Calvinist culture

with a tremendous amount of guilt about acquisition.

They're generally worried

that although they've worked hard for this, earned it,

nonetheless in wealth itself there's a principle of corruption

that will undo them or undo their souls or make them unhappy.

So, you find a very odd,

kind of, push-pull thing happening in Dutch still life painting

between on the one hand a perfectly understandable desire

to celebrate all this wealth with which the country is awash.

At the same time,

a sort of residual religious sentiment that this is not good.

Strictly speaking, as devout Calvinists,

the Dutch shouldn't be celebrating their affluence with decorative art.

So how do you keep collecting paintings

and avoid the corrupting influence of acquisition?

Still life painters had an answer for these guilty Protestants,

containing a message with a rather daunting reminder of mortality.

The subject of the vanitas, the painting that reminds us of death,

is a whole class of still life painting

where the symbols of death and mortality

and the transience of human life

are so obvious that they can't be avoided.

Most often, we recognise a vanitas painting

by the presence of a skull,

which is sort of a dead giveaway that, you know,

everything else around the skull has to do with the idea

of death and transience

and the futility of accumulating material possessions

because, when you die, you don't take it with you.

Very often, another component that we see

are helmets or militaria

that remind you of the futility of war, ultimately.

A lot of times, you see items that have to do with music

because before recorded music,

music was something that existed only as you played it.

And as soon as you stopped, it was dead.

It didn't exist any more.

It's as if these people are celebrating their riches

and yet there's always this vanitas undertone of meaning.

You know, all of this is going to fade, it will pass.

And Holland, you know, Holland was a hugely volatile nation.

Fortunes were made and lost like that.

So any depiction of riches, wealth, grandeur and splendour

was always, you know, was always threatened.

A still life painting makes that perfectly explicit.

You know, you can always imagine pulling that cloth

and everything would go onto the floor.

Well, life was like that for the Dutch.

Despite the millions of paintings

that were created in Holland during the 17th century,

the most comprehensive collection of Golden Age still life

is to be found somewhere a bit closer to home.

The Ashmolean has surprisingly one of the largest,

if not the largest,

collections of still life painting

from 17th-century Holland and Flanders

in existence.

It's a remarkable collection

because it covers every aspect of still life painting

in the period from the early 1600s through to the early 1700s.

Well, here we are in the collection of still life paintings, at last.

This collection was given to us in 1939

by a collector from Newcastle, called Theodore Ward,

who made his money in international paint.

The collection was given to us in memory of his widow,

Daisy Linda Travers,

or Daisy Linda Ward as she became after her marriage,

who was an opera singer in her early years.

The collection is probably the most comprehensive of its kind

The collection is probably the most comprehensive of its kind

in existence.

Most of the great names of the 17th century

are here in this gallery.

And it goes round the room in a sequence

passing through the large paintings of Isaak Soreau,

an artist who came from Frankfurt,

and who painted in a tradition that's slightly different

from the tradition that we associate

with painting in Holland at this time.

The painting by Clara Peeters

is probably one of the most important paintings

in the collection of the Ashmolean,

not because Clara Peeters is a famous artist.

In fact the opposite is true.

Her life is particularly obscure.

We don't know where she was born, we don't know when she was born.

We're not even sure who taught her to paint.

But the pictures themselves bear witness

to the accomplishment in the art of still life painting

by an artist who was working in the 1620s, 1630s.

Her work is magnificent.

And as we come round to this long wall,

we pass a great display of the more florid painters

of the middle years of the 17th century.

And it moves through a really sensational

group of paintings by Abraham Van Beyeren,

whose banquet pieces speak for themselves,

so gloriously detailed are they.

A grand banquet of a type which no doubt

Abraham Van Beyeren himself rarely enjoyed.

And we move round the corner into a series of paintings

which take us towards the end of the 17th century

and into the beginning of the 18th century,

when this much more decorative tendency,

the more florid and colourful tendency

that we saw in these earlier paintings

reaches a kind of rococo apogee.

And this is a tendency that continues through

into the works of Rachel Ruysch, for example,

whose ornamental and almost rococo pictures

represent a final theme

in the development of Dutch still life painting

as it emerged in the early 1700s.

She was a very important artist

but she was also one of the last in this great century of paintings

that mark the golden age in the history of the art of still life.

I suppose my favourite painting in this gallery

is the least typical of them all

and one that stands aside from the more sumptuous paintings

that were being done in the lifetime of the artist, Adriaen Coorte,

about whom we know very little.

You get what you see in a painting like this.

It is very...

understated.

And the reason why he painted it is particularly opaque,

other than the fact that he wanted to make an image,

and a particularly liquid and beautifully-lit image,

of such a commonplace thing as a bundle of asparagus.

It's making out of the stuff of nature and the commonplace

something that is as lasting as a work of art and a thing of beauty.

I've never felt so warmly about asparagus in real life

as I do in the flat and silent art of still life painting.

I love this one.

Taking commonplace things

and elevating them into objects of great beauty

wasn't just restricted to the Netherlands.

Spanish painters had also begun to explore the art of materialism.

In Spain, which is an immensely powerful country

with a huge empire, a vast economy and a very powerful aristocracy...

Nonetheless, its interpretation of still life painting

is to locate its true being in the monasteries,

in monastic painting,

painted by painters who either were lay brothers

painted by painters who either were lay brothers

or had experience of monastic communities.

These austere arrangements

were painted by a Spanish Carthusian monk,

Juan Sanchez Cotan.

They're known as works of Bodegons,

larder pieces.

The items of food featured were stored within a concrete block

The items of food featured were stored within a concrete block

and suspended on string

to help with refrigeration.

Unlike his contemporaries in the Netherlands,

Cotan was a dedicated realist,

painting the world exactly as he found it.

If you look at Cotan,

it's very much about a kind of renunciation of the world.

It's about leaving the world.

Not believing in the world's show.

Looking at the simplest things in the world because your values

are adjusted to the values of monastic life, contemplative life.

In some Spanish still life painting, you get the contents of a larder.

It could not be more unimportant.

They are arranged in these suspensions of string

that make them seem like mathematical constructions

or like the solar system.

They look completely out of this world. They look otherworldly.

Otherworldly still life. No other school does that.

If the 17th century had seen the golden age of still life,

in the 18th, it suffered a more complicated fate.

This is the world-famous Louvre, in Paris.

In its earlier existence, it was the French royal palace.

By the 18th century, Louis XIV, the Sun King,

decided this place wasn't grand enough

to suit his rather extravagant tastes and moved his entire court

to a new home, Versailles.

Back at the Louvre, the building was soon occupied by a new institution

that would make Paris the centre of European art.

The French Academy was founded in 1648

and the elected academicians agreed what were the rules of art.

They decided what constituted the best kind of art,

They decided what constituted the best kind of art,

what was less important art, what was the least important art,

and they also controlled, in effect, royal commissions,

so anyone who wanted to get big money for painting

needed to go through the Academy.

The academies placed a very high value on drawing

and painting the human figure. Life class was the centre of the Academy.

and painting the human figure. Life class was the centre of the Academy.

Artists were chiefly judged for their talent as figure painters.

They were trained to paint human figures,

they were trained to paint physiognomy and gesture and action.

Human drama, in other words,

which was regarded as the most important element,

so that an artist who did not paint the human figure

or indeed in some cases artists who could not paint the human figure,

were regarded as the bottom of the heap.

The academic tradition of painting placed still life,

which just shows inanimate things, absolutely bottom,

then came landscape which was depiction of the world,

then came portrait, depiction of man, but then the serious stuff begins.

Mythological painting, narrative painting, biblical painting.

That was high art because it shows man in action, man in thought.

That's why this hierarchy exists.

Still life painters are always fighting an uphill battle,

always fighting to be taken seriously.

Chardin, the great French still life,

probably the first still life painter to begin to be really

taken seriously, he fights the good fight.

"Proust once wrote an essay in which he set out to restore

"a smile to the face of a gloomy, envious and dissatisfied young man.

"He pictured this young man sitting at a table after lunch one day

"in his parents' flat, gazing dejectedly at his surroundings.

"The mundanity of the scene would contrast with the young man's taste

"for beautiful and costly things which he lacked the money to buy.

"Proust imagined the revulsion the young aesthete would feel

"at this bourgeois interior, and how he would compare it

"at this bourgeois interior, and how he would compare it

"to the splendours he had seen in museums and cathedrals.

"To escape his domestic gloom, the young man might leave the flat

"and go to the Louvre, where at least he could feast his eyes

"on splendid things.

"Touched by his predicament, Proust proposed to make

"a radical change to the young man's life by way of a modest alteration

"to his museum itinerary.

"Rather than let him hurry to galleries hung with paintings

"by Claude and Veronese,

"Proust suggested leading him to a quite different part of the museum,

"to those galleries hung with the works of Jean`Baptiste Chardin.

"A peach by him was as pink and chubby as a cherub,

"a plate of oysters or a slice of lemon

"were tempting symbols of gluttony and sensuality.

"A skate slit open and hanging from a hook

"evoked the sea of which it had been a fearsome denizen in its lifetime.

"Its insides, coloured with a deep red blood,

"blue nerves and white muscles, were like the naves of a polychrome cathedral.

"After an encounter with Chardin,

"Proust had high hopes for the spiritual transformation

"of his sad young man as he wrote,

"'Once he had been dazzled by this opulent description

"'of what he called mediocrity, this appetising depiction of a life

"'he had found insipid, this great art of nature

"'he had found so paltry, I should say to him, now, are you happy?'"

I think what's remarkable about Chardin is he is undeniably a great artist.

He's got total command of his medium

and none of his critics

and observers of his time

could possibly deny that this was

a master of handling the medium of paint.

But what was fascinating and what was such a challenge

to his contemporaries was what he decided it was important to paint.

to his contemporaries was what he decided it was important to paint.

He didn't just say that still life was important.

He showed in a visceral and sensory way that it could be.

Jean-Baptiste Chardin was an 18th-century French artist

and one of the finest painters of still life the world has ever known.

Born in Paris, he never once left the city.

He lived in a period dominated by the extravagant rococo style of Neoclassicism.

His simple act of revolution was to create a world of truth and calm.

In 1728, without establishment contacts

and with no intellectual background,

Chardin submitted two works to the all-powerful French Academy.

He was instantly accepted.

He's like a revolutionary force that's constantly being pushed down.

In the Academy, he was given the lowest possible job,

the person who hangs the paintings for the annual shows,

so he's officially where he should be, at the bottom of the heap.

One has to remember that for the 18th century,

in France and in all Europe,

the major quality of a painter was invention.

To paint a still life was considered as the simplest thing you could do

To paint a still life was considered as the simplest thing you could do

because you had no invention.

You had in front of you some peaches or something,

and you had to copy them. It looked like it was so simple to do so.

Chardin in a certain way breaks this.

He is trying to say, he is proving that in a certain way

it is as difficult and as great to paint something you see,

as something you don't see,

and for the 18th century it was very difficult to accept this.

He had his own way of thinking, his own way of painting

and in fact for him, simplicity was one of the keys of the greatest art.

Simplicity, but what I think is even more important for him

is how to paint silence.

To paint fruit is very easy but to paint silence is very difficult.

Chardin is really a sort of peaceful place,

a sort of peaceful garden out of time

where you forget the trouble of your everyday life.

We are living around objects, objects around us everywhere.

We are not looking at them.

We are forgetting that they are unique in a certain way.

That food is unique,

le gobelet d'argent, silver has always beauties.

An artist, especially an artist interested in still life,

to make you aware of the beauty of things around you.

With such magnificent ability, Chardin's reputation and fame grew

and despite his radical choice of lowly subject,

he became one of the richest painters in France.

In one slightly bizarre work,

we can see him parody his own position

whilst poking fun at his detractors within the Academy.

Chardin knows a lot about optics

and will have had conversations about how the eye works,

and he introduces something very amazing into still life painting,

which is the idea that the eye doesn't see

everything at the same degree of vigilant high focus.

If you look at most Chardin paintings,

there will be one, two or maybe three perches

for the eye to rest on, where things are in high focus,

and the rest will be blurry and that blur

is something very special to Chardin. No-one produced this before Chardin.

He had techniques he didn't want people to see,

because there is no record of what it was like to watch Chardin paint,

but it's very clear he had a lot of unorthodox techniques

for applying the paint to the canvas.

It's very clear he was handling paint, which you shouldn't do.

If you look at the late self portraits, his skin is going grey

until finally it's completely grey and he's dying of lead poisoning.

He has been handling paint all his life and takes its toll.

Paint is a very toxic substance.

Within the French Royal Academy, Chardin would influence

the perception of what still life could achieve.

In 1770, another still life painter would submit works

whilst applying to join the institution.

This artist would face a different kind of prejudice.

She was 26-year-old Anne Vallayer-Coster.

She was one of only four women ever accepted in the French Academy.

At the time, very few female painters

could even dream of a serious career in art.

She was enormously talented, incredibly confident handling

both of composition and the surface texture of things.

She was patronised by Marie Antoinette.

She enabled Vallayer-Coster to get lodgings in the Louvre,

which was absolutely exceptional for a woman, and meant she had

her lodgings and studio in among the other top artists of her time.

The academies were the key institutions

if you wanted a successful career as an artist

but they were of course deeply problematic for women.

At a very straightforward level,

women were not allowed in art academies

because there were naked men there,

and women were not allowed to hire male models to paint from.

However, women were allowed to look at bunches of grapes.

That's one of the reasons why women flourish in the field

of still life painting.

It's one of the few areas they're allowed in!

Women were barred from acquiring the skills

they need for the higher genres, and then they were told that women

were only capable of the lowest ones.

Although they might be seen a equal to men within that sphere,

they could never quite get the higher status and reputation

that was open to men.

Vallayer-Coster is typical of a line of female artists

throughout history, whose desire to paint found expression

through the only genre considered suitable for them.

Women were marginalised in art

and found an outlet in the disregarded genre of still life.

The talent Vallayer-Coster displayed demonstrates that she was the equal

of any other Academy painter.

In the end, her association with Marie Antoinette

and the Royal Court would have a ruinous effect on her career,

as French society was engulfed in the pandemonium of revolution.

By the 19th century, France had been transformed.

Despite the political turmoil, the strict French Academy system

had survived but art too was about to undergo its own revolution.

An unknown painter from a small town in the south of France

was about to change everything.

Still life would lead the charge.

The artist's name was Paul Cezanne.

Cezanne was born here in the small town of Aix-en-Provence in 1839.

It was here he built his studio

and dedicated himself to a revolutionary artistic style.

Today he is remembered as a monumental figure,

Today he is remembered as a monumental figure,

the father of modern art.

But in his own lifetime, many did not or could not

understand him or his work.

To his contemporaries, his radical painting style looked rushed...

..imprecise...

and distorted.

It was the antithesis of the realism

that had dominated European art for centuries.

Cezanne thinks, "Huh, light falling on objects...

"Maybe painting is all about perception.

"How am I going to emphasise painting is all about perception?

"I know! I'll paint something really banal.

"I'll paint an apple," and then he says "I'll stun Paris with an apple."

He's not really painting an apple.

What he's painting is his own way of seeing

and if you look, he's given it a double outline.

It's his way of saying, everything we look at is constantly just...

If you look at Cezanne, it makes you feel a bit sick.

Picasso said the great thing about Cezanne is his anxiety.

Painting an apple was his way of showing his anxiety,

his uncertainty, his sense that what we see is not fixed.

Welcome to Cezanne's studio.

The studio was designed by Cezanne himself.

He wanted a very large picture window on the north

and two other large windows on the south.

The light is very important in the studio.

The light is very important in the studio.

He wanted to get the same condition he had when he was outside.

Cezanne died in 1906 and the studio doesn't change in any way.

You have the same atmosphere in this hall.

You always smile at the painting and the fruit.

All the objects in the studio were painted by Cezanne

and we can now recognise the main objects,

like this little plaster Cupid,

who was painted by Cezanne in 10 works.

The star is this green pot and olive pot.

A ginger pot, a round bottle, a wine bottle, a glass.

All these objects Cezanne painted in his still life

are very simple objects,

and the form and the reflection of this object

was the main interest for Cezanne for painting them.

This is the fruit bowl we see in so many still lives.

You can recognise on this table the specific line here.

Of course, the skulls we can recognise

in his vanities.

And on this bottle, we can see his finger marks.

All around.

It's very emotional to see that this bottle was in the hand of Cezanne.

What is amazing is knowing that the simple objects

became model of still lives

and with the subjects he concretises all his theory on painting.

There are no long strokes.

There are no improvised strokes and Cezanne.

They are very much the record of individual moments of sensation.

He wanted to give a kind of exact transcription not of the scene,

but of his perceiving of the scene,

so it's a very introverted, sensation and consciousness-based kind of art.

His project is to tell no lies about painting, invent nothing,

simply record, and he pursues this project faithfully

and without swerving for years and years without an audience.

It's a very strange story.

He only gets an audience right at the end of his life

when he doesn't need it. Too little, too late.

Cezanne was the first painter of the 20th century.

He wasn't the last painter of the 19th century,

and young painters like Picasso, Matisse, and a friend of him,

Gauguin, thought he was the great painter of all the Impressionists.

Picasso called him the father of modern art,

the father of all the painters of the 20th century.

Cezanne had abandoned the fiction

that a painting is a window into reality

that a painting is a window into reality

in which we see a 3D object in a 3D space.

The rules of perspective and representation

could now be bent to the will of the artist.

Still life had become an artistic laboratory for the reworking

of the visible world.

This impressionistic approach,

this challenge to the established orthodoxy,

became widespread in 19th-century France.

Artists such as Renoir,

Monet

and Gauguin would establish a new language for still life.

And if the genre could be used as a foundation stone

for a new type of expression, it would also become fundamental

in the development of an entirely new art form.

Photographers started to make photographs

of still life compositions, mainly because they didn't move.

The early kinds of photographic processes,

you had eight-minute exposures.

Quite quickly, photographers began to use in effect

the language of art, the still life language of art,

to develop their technique.

By the 1850s, you get quite amazing still life photography,

really quite amazing.

Artists definitely used photography and responded to it,

so photography changed the way people saw.

Once photography itself exists,

I think it makes suddenly startlingly clear to painters

both the power of that image and its limitations.

It's as if artists suddenly completely reel away in horror

from the photographic,

so if you look at a Van Gogh painting of irises,

it's a million miles away from what a photographer would have done,

and he's emphasising his own expressive interreaction

with the flowers, as he does in the Sunflowers.

He shows them reaching up, he shows them falling down.

He shows the rapidity of their ascent and their descent.

They become images of himself but he's also fascinated by the texture,

which of course you can't capture in a photograph.

He stipples the paint to create that sense of the seedhead

and you would stroke the painting if you could, it's not advisable,

but if you could you would see that it would feel rough to the touch

like an actual dried sunflower seedhead.

He's given this almost sculptural element, I would say, in reaction to photography.

I think photography makes artists scratch their head and think,

well, what can painting do that photography can't do?

And from there, suddenly,

still life becomes the fundamental form of cubism, which is

the single most significant art movement

of the whole 20th century and it's all still life.

Cubism allowed the exploration of an object from every possible angle,

with artists painting the subject

from several different viewpoints at once.

Artists such as Picasso and Braque

would use still life to provide an anchor point

for the fragmented planes

and spatial chaos that became the signature style of the new movement.

When Picasso is tackling still life, it becomes illegible.

He plays around massively within that.

It's still acceptable to audiences

because we can still read this as, "Oh, it's a still life painting."

And, as it were, digest what's happening experimentally

far more easily because it's talking a classical language to us.

Why is it all still life?

Because perception itself, how the artist sees has become the subject.

So, if you paint what everybody sees, i.e. still lives,

what's on the table,

what you're really showing is how you see,

how you perceive this notion that we travel around an object,

that experience exists in time that the flat image is not doing

justice to the complexity of our perception.

Painting becomes a form on philosophy

and at the moment the painting becomes a form of philosophy.

Still life becomes the king sitting on the throne of art.

If art is about the elevation of subject,

then still life might just be the king.

It's been there, acting as an artistic barometer, helping us

explore and explain our relationship with the material that surrounds us.

The very stuff of life.

And in the West during the 20th century, there was nothing

we liked more than stuff.

Big difference that makes the 20th century

different from the previous centuries is the status of objects

themselves because at a certain point in the 20th century it

became clear that everything's going to be machine-made from now on.

We come from a world in which everything that we sit on,

everything that we wear, everything we drive,

all of our appliances and technology is machine made.

We live in a machine world, a machine age.

And at a certain point it's clear that to go on making classical

still life in the machine age is...it doesn't make that much sense.

Still life shatters into becoming an ordinary feature of newspaper

and advertising. It goes to live in advertising.

It's not recognised as still life any more.

In the 20th century, if cubists used still life to explore new

dimensions, it was advertising that fed on its traditional form.

Now today, in the 21st century,

still life continues to evolve in surprising ways.

What I like and interested in, in this particular work,

is the moment of destruction is the moment of creation itself.

Throughout my work, I'm exploring the relationship between painting

and photography and film.

The painting of Juan Cotan that I referred to in my film,

Pomegranate, was at the back of my mind for many years.

There is something quite, I would say, chilling about this painting.

The more I look at it, the more it keeps on giving and giving.

So, thinking about Pomegranate and I was thinking about the bullet

and there is a moment of eruption, there is a moment of interruption.

I was imagining the seeds bleeding.

They are still life

but they are as far as one can be removed from a still life

because what they actually depict is an event that

happened in the most extraordinary speed.

A speed that the human being cannot comprehend or conceive.

I like to make things that have the appearance of something

you've seen before and are subverted in some kind of way.

So, these are the flowers that I've taken

and made moulds of and then cast and then I built on these little

pustules and sores which are based on syphilis and gonorrhoea.

And for me, flowers are pretty primitive breeding machines.

They're basically there to procreate,

that's all they are, they're sexual creatures.

So, I wanted to make them look like sexual breeding machines.

If nature is a barometer of the times we're living in,

the environment, then these things could be taken

as an indication of the pathology of the society that we live in.

That things are sick and poisoned and that there's a problem there.

So over here we've got some still life pictures that I made

and they are recreations of meals that prisoners ate

on Death Row before they're executed.

So, basically I decided that what I was going to do was

photograph them in the style of 17th century Dutch still life painting.

Which means that you're looking at a photograph of a Chicken McNugget

through the framework of a vanitas painting,

which means you're looking at it different from what you'd normally do,

you're thinking about the futility of life and the

meaninglessness of the accumulation of worldly goods and idle pursuits.

This one here, I think is Gary Gilmore.

Burgers, boiled eggs, coffees and little shots of whiskey.

A lot of them are really quite touching

because the meals that they've chosen are from their childhood.

This is Allen Lee Davis

and he had a last meal which made it particularly easy for me

because it was using elements that were present

in a lot of 17th century Dutch still life. You've got the big lobster.

I mean, I think they fit in the tradition of vanitas pictures.

It makes you look at something, reflecting on vanity basically

and there's got to be more to life than consumption.

The very term "still life" if you said it to a person in the street

would sound slightly incongruous

because one thing that we know about life now is that it's not still.

It's dynamic, it's moving, it's constantly shifting.

Still life asks us to arrest a particular moment

and to look closely, to observe closely

and that is something we're not used to doing any more.

Because novelty has such prestige, change has such prestige.

We're constantly asking, what's new, what's different?

Still life asks us to look at the overlooked, the familiar

and to discover depths in it.

We speak of ourselves as a materialistic society

but I think the problem is we're not materialistic enough.

We're hasty in our materialism.

We constantly want to buy more stuff but then we don't study it.

Who sat down with something they recently bought

and actually looked closely at it,

tried to look how it was put together and tried to

appreciate the effort, the beauty, the complexity of an object?

There's so many things that we have around us that are ingenious

and attractive but that we just don't take the trouble to look at.

Still life urges us, before we go on another shopping trip,

stop and take a proper look.