Top 10 still-life paintings

Chaffinch Nest and May Blossom

ARTIST NAME
William Henry Hunt
PAINTED IN c1845
DETAILS Watercolour
and gouache
The Victorian art critic John Ruskin was
notoriously hard to please, so when he
calls someone “the finest ever painter of
still life”, it’s worth paying attention.
Unlike many of the artists here, William
Henry ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt (his nickname
came from his favourite subject) did not
start life with many advantages. He was
the working-class son of a tin-plate
maker from the then insalubrious Covent
Garden, and he was disabled: his
butcher uncle, not mincing his words,
said of him: “He was always a poor
cripple, and as he was fit for nothing,
they made an artist of him.”
Hunt was apprenticed to the mystically
inclined John Varley, a close friend of
another working class art hero, William
Blake, but Varley’s taste for astrology
and woo didn’t rub off on his pupil.
Instead Hunt was more inclined to
scientific observation, and this made him
a favourite of art patron Dr Thomas
Monro, of the infamous Bethlem
(‘Bedlam’) Hospital. Monro often invited
Hunt to his country house, where it’s
said he was pushed around the
countryside in a hooded wheelbarrow,
sketching madly all the while. The
Victorians’ ecological nonchalance
meant he thought nothing of taking
egg-laden nests back to his studio, from
which static indoor spot he managed
nonetheless to create an image redolent
with symbols of boyish springtime
frolics, such as maying and bird-nesting.

“Victorian art critic John Ruskin called Hunt

‘the finest ever painter of still life’”
© Alamy

as the sky-blue morning glory, she

frequently painted jimsonweed, also
known as datura, used as hallucinogenic
shamanic medicine by the local
Indigenous peoples, as well as painting
the limitless possibilities of the blue
desert skies. O’Keeffe magnified and
celebrated the physicality of the
southern United States of America for
the land it was, not the transplanted
Europe its society thought it wanted to
© Alamy

be, contributing to the countercultural

shift of the mid 20th century.

21
The history of still life
Vanitas Still Life
ARTIST NAME
Maria van Oosterwijck
PAINTED IN 1668
DETAILS Oil on canvas
In the lower midground of this toweringly
accomplished vanitas painting sits a red
admiral butterfly. A still life symbol of
both ephemerality and Christian
resurrection, this particular breed –
vanessa atalanta – is the signature motif
of Maria van Oosterwijck, one of the
most sought-after painters of the Dutch
Golden Age (the other was another
woman, the later flower painter Rachel
Ruysch). It’s a device she used again and
again; a flash of red to draw the eye into
her chiaroscuro compositions, a
decorative arrow to point to something
she wants the viewer to pay attention to
– in this case the book that notes
22
Sunflowers
ARTIST NAME
Vincent van Gogh
PAINTED IN 1888
DETAILS Oil on canvas
© Public Domain, Wiki Commons, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
In 1987, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers
briefly became the most expensive still
life painting in the world, as it set the
then record for the most ever paid for a
painting at auction, at $39.85 million
(that’s about $94 million today). But
was it this painting? No. There are 13
Sunflowers in two different series, and
the 1987 record breaker was Still Life:
Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, which was
bought by Japanese businessman
Yasuo Goto, and now hangs in the
Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo. The
version seen here hangs in the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam.
Van Gogh loved sunflowers because
to him they symbolised his friendship
“calculation – we live unto death and die with fellow artist Paul Gauguin, and he
unto life” – and of course the seal of her painted so many images of them
identity and the painting’s authenticity. because he wanted to decorate his
The maintenance of her authentic studio and lodgings, the Yellow House,
identity in a society and era in which in Arles, France, with them, with the aim
women were supposed to be dutiful of the building becoming a creative
Protestant wives and mothers (such as retreat for himself and Gauguin, as well
Ruysch, who bore ten children and was as other artists. In one letter to artist
lauded for it) was vitally important to van Emile Bernard on 21 August 1888 he
Oosterwijck. She refused a proposal wrote, “I’m thinking of decorating my
from artist Willem van Aelst and stayed studio with half a dozen paintings of
single all her life, which she devoted to Sunflowers”; the next day he wrote to his
painting. This devotion is evident from brother Theo, “I’d like to do a decoration
the assured strength of this vanitas for the studio. Nothing but large
painting, which mixes memento mori Sunflowers”. Van Gogh soon realised
subjects like the skull and cut, wilting that sunflowers were, effectively, his
flowers, with symbols of resurrection brand: in another letter to his brother
and rebirth, such as corn and wheat, and from January 1889, he said, “You know
the globe, which alludes to the only other that Jeannin has the peony, Quost has
thing that van Oosterwijck was devoted the hollyhock, but I have the sunflower,
to – her deeply held faith. in a way.”