HISTORICAL CONTEXT:

Still life is a work of art, a drawing or painting of a group of objects. Objects do not move, hence the word ‘still.’ In the past the objects tended to be flowers,fruit and other kinds of food or dead animals- hence ‘life.’ The French for still life is ‘nature morte’ meaning ‘dead nature.’ Nowadays, though, still life can mean any objects small enough to be put infront of us, usually on a table. The Ancient Egyptian people have been painting collections of objects for a thousand of years. The ancients Egyptians painted stacks offering for thousands of years. The Egyptians painted objects typically to offer them to Gods in temples or tombs.

The earliest known still life painting was created by the Egytpians in the 15th Century BCE. They produced paintings of food, including crops, fish and meat some of this fabulous artwork has been discovered and retrieved out of ancient burial sites. Ancient Greeks and Romans also created similar deceptions of inanimate objects.

The goal of a still life composition is to direct the viewer’s eye through a painting and lead them toward what the artist thinks is important. Many beginning painters tend to devote their energy to drawing and painting objects accurately, and find it difficult to create a strong composition.

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EXAMPLES OF HISTORICAL STILL LIFE IMAGES:

The cook maid and market scenes, popular in the seventeenth century evolved in the low countries from a genre practiced by Pieter Aertsen ( c.1533 – c.1573) and his colleague Joachim Beucklaear, which combined contemporary kitchen scenes with a new testament episode beyond. Bacon could have been inspired by the work he had seen on his visit he made to the low countries in 1613.

Religiously, this image would have suited the era in which it was painted. Symbolically, the idea that their is a house wife in the kitchen would have suited the traditional values that would have had to be upheld during this time. A woman would always be the one that sat at home and cooks for her family .