“A still life (also known as nature morte or
Stilleven ) painting is a piece that features an arrangement of inanimate objects as its subject.'”
https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-still-life-painting-definition/
When the Dutch republic was created it gave everyone a great sense on national identity which people were extremely proud of. With this pride and the flourishing economy, people started collecting and thus still life portraits became extremely popular with people wanting to show off how wealthy they were or how many interesting artifacts they’d collated from various exotic places. With trade becoming popular with far away and exotic places, 17th century artists couldn’t help but focus highly on these artifacts and adopted a “close scrutiny of the natural world.”. Along with their fixation of capturing light, this created the basis on which the genre of still life was to be built. By the mid-century, still life was common practice and eventually split into its own different categories, with the earliest example being at the beginning of the 1600’s and were the flower paintings inspired by ‘tulip-mania, then followed by flowers with fruit then breakfast pieces.
Examples:
