British Council British Council Visual Arts

Still Life is one of the principle genres of Western art. The term was derived from the Dutch word stilleven and first appeared in the 17th Century to denote a type of painting featuring inanimate everyday objects. The French term nature morte followed, similarly defining a category in which commonplace objects formed the subject of a painting, rather than incidental elements within it. The repertoire of featured items has altered as the genre evolved. In the golden age of Dutch and Spanish painting in the 17th Century the subject matter included flowers, fruit and other foods, dead and live animals, pots and vessels, draped textiles, musical instruments, books, weapons, natural history collections and cabinets of curiosities. Allegorical works included objects representing the five senses and objects associated with the vanitas (mortality) theme such as a skull or timepiece, which symbolised the transience of life and the irrelevance of worldly goods. Much later Cubist still lifes of the 20th Century featured and indeed incorporated objects associated with urban café society such as newspapers and musical scores. The subsequent emergence of Surrealism and the appearance of the Readymade expanded the range even further. Artists have continued to plunder the iconography of the genre, abstracting it, objectifying it, enlarging and multiplying it, photographing, filming and digitising it.

The plural of Still Life is Still Lifes (not Still Lives).