Still Life Art

Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in Paris in a large scale museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism.

Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Gris, and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and, eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th Century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.

Cézanne painted his still life art between 1877 and 1905. Much of his more intricate work is displayed in major museums worldwide.

Still Life Art by bethd821

Members of an influential family of Philadelphia painters, James Peale and his nephew Raphaelle (1774-1825) have been credited with setting a standard in still-life painting that contributed to a broader taste for this subject among American patrons during the 1820s. James began his artistic career as a portrait and miniature painter under the tutelage of his older, influential brother Charles Willson Peale. In an effort to avoid competing with one another in a tight art market during the post-Revolution era, the brothers agreed to divide their work in portraiture: James focused on miniature painting, while Charles did larger oils on canvas. As James faced failing eyesight during the 1810s, he turned from the detailed work of miniature portraits to larger still-life and landscape subjects. Remarkably, he was seventy-six years old when he painted this elegant arrangement of apples and grapes spilling out of a Chinese export-porcelain bowl. James clearly delighted in the variety of textures- from the smooth sheen of porcelain and mahogany to the cloudy moisture of the grapes and the serrated edges of their leaves. The illusion of reality is heightened by placement of the fruit at the edge of a tabletop as if to tempt the viewer to reach for it.

Photo credit to ArtLex on Still Life.

Henri was a member of the Batignolles Group, a group of painters who, after about 1867, met in the evenings at the Café Guerbois, located on the rue des Batignolles, Paris. The group was centered around Edouard Manet (French, 1832-1883), and included Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903), Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917), and Alfred Sisley (French, 1839-1899). They met to discuss and sharpen their wits, and although most of them are associated with Impressionism, they did not constitute a style or school of painting.

Photo from ArtLex on Still Life.