Day 245 - Two still lifes



 April 9, 2021

Gallery 627 spotlights the rise during the 17th century of two new kinds of subjects for paintings: still lifes and genre scenes.  Interestingly, the signage notes that a number of women artists took to painting still lifes because training for this form did not require drawing and painting the male nude, activities forbidden to women. I don't recognize most of the artists whose works are hung in the gallery, with the exception of a small portrait whose loose brushwork unmistakably marks it as a Franz Hals (and which seems out of place among the other works, I must say).

I'm especially drawn to two of the still lifes, for opposite reasons. The first is a small (approximately 21 inches high and 16 inches wide) oil on wood by Clara Peters, a Flemish painter whose dates are approximately 1587-1637.  It shows a variety of flowers, painted in luminous, harmonious shades of red and rose, blue,  yellow, and white, casually arranged in a black vase, all against a dark ground. The blooms are depicted with such clarity of line and realism that it is easy to identify peonies, an iris, tulips (inevitably!), and many other flowers whose names I should know but don't. Some blossoms have fallen to the table, perhaps a symbol of the evanescence of life and beauty.  But on the whole, the image is, to me, one of lively refinement, in which each flower has its designated place. 

In contrast, the second still life, titled "Basket of Fruit," seems to spill over with abundance - the grapes overflowing the basket, the leaf in the upper register extending beyond the picture frame. Painted by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, who was born in Viterbo in 1587 and died in Rome in 1626, the painting, which measures about 20 inches high and 34 inches wide, has a restrained palette of various shades of green (leaves, grapes, pears), browns (the basket, the background), and deep purples (another variety of grapes),  broken by patches of red (a tomato, the interior of a pomegranate, the shading of a peach). There is a sense of lushness and plenty.  But when I look closely at the tomato, I can't tell whether the dark spot at its top is a leaf or a sign of mold and rot. I learned early on to look for symbols of corruption and decay in still lifes; am I now looking for a memento mori in every  work,  even when it doesn't exist? 

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