Still Life Paintings Gallery

Still life Paintings

Still Life art is an important and popular branch of Painting. Historically, this art has been very much appreciated. In modern times too, the still life paintings are very much popular. The Still Life art depicts drinking glasses, foodstuffs, pipes, books and so on. Still life paintings give the artist more margin in the arrangement of design elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture.

The walls of ancient Egyptian tombs are famous for adorning the still life paintings. It was believed that the foodstuffs and other items depicted there would, in the afterlife, become real and available for use by the deceased. The popular appreciation of still life painting as a demonstration of the artist's skill is related in the ancient Greek legend of Zeuxis and Parrhasius.

Still life in Western art was mainly used as an adjunct to Christian religious subjects through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is evident from the work of Northern European artists. Painters such as Jan van Eyck often used still life elements as part of an iconographic program.

The French aristocracy of the 18th century also employed artists to execute paintings of bounteous and extravagant still life subjects. The Rococo love of artifice led to a rise in appreciation for trompe l'oeil (French: "trick the eye") painting. It is a type of still life in which objects are shown life-sized, against a flat background, in an attempt to create the illusion of real three dimensional objects in the viewer's space.

With the rise of the European Academies and their formalized approach to artistic training, still life began to fall from favor. The Academies taught the doctrine of "Hierarchy of genres" (or "Hierarchy of Subject Matter"). It states that a painting's artistic merit was based primarily on its subject. In the Academic system, the highest form of painting consisted of images of historical, Biblical or mythological significance, with still life subjects relegated to the very lowest order of artistic recognition.

Much Pop Art (such as Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans") is based on still life, but its true subject is most often the commodified image of the commercial product represented rather than the physical still life object itself. The rise of Photorealism in the 1970s reasserted illusionistic representation, while retaining some of Pop's message of the fusion of object, image, and commercial product. The paintings of Don Eddy and Ralph Goings are the typical examples of this style.

Admirers of Still Life paintings can see the still life paintings of their liking by visiting our website at www.paintingsgifts4u.com and by clicking the section of Still Life Oil paintings. You can get Still Life Paintings of your choice just by selecting the Model number or by sending the Photo of the image for which You want to get the still life painting. Our highly skilled artists can also reproduce the Still life paintings as per your given photo. For more details, Please visit our website and contact us at : info@paintingsgifts4u.com for your inquiry.