Still Life Paintings

A comparison of the paintings "Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill,"and "Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza and Glassware" by Dutch painters Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda.

1,424 words () | 4 sources | MLA | 2008 Philippines

Paper Summary:

The paper examines and contrasts "The Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill" created by Pieter Claesz, and the "Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware" created by Willem Claesz Heda. The paper explains how "Skull and a Writing Quill" is a representative of the vanitas while "Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware" represents the breakfast paintings. The paper shows how these paintings, coming from the leading still-life artists of seventeenth-century Haarlem, Netherlands, showed the same application of lines, colors and lighting as well as depth and perspective.

From the Paper:

"Despite the Renaissance movement sweeping Europe at this period, the artists in Netherlands couldn't create paintings portraying religious iconography as this was forbidden by mandate of the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church. There was also a growing interest in horticulture among the middle classes in Netherlands at this point . These two factors combined to give rise to the still life paintings as a new form of iconography.
"In Haarlem, Pieter and Heda were the leaders of this artistic style, particularly in the creation of the so-called vanitas paintings. The vanitas represent a new form of iconography in which the images represent the sensory pleasures of life that are tempered with moral messages. A skull, a burning candle, or a decaying fruit could mean the ticking of life and its imminent demise. Another symbolism, which Pieter and Heda popularized, is on the group of still life paintings known as breakfast paintings."

Sample of Sources Used:

Adelheid M., Gealt. Painting of the Golden Age: A Biographical Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century European Painters. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Lyas, Colin. Aesthetics. London: UCL Press, 1997.
Taylor, Paul. Dutch Flower Painting 1600-1720. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Przyblyski, Jeannene M. "Courbet, the Commune and the Meanings of Still Life in 1871." Art Journal 55 (1996): 87-92.