Reading Comprehension

Few categories of European painting have suffered more from the polite indifference of textbooks than the Dutch still life of the seventeenth century. The genre is presented, when it is presented at all, as a competent but minor form — pleasant arrangements of fruit, glassware, lobsters, and skulls, executed with a skill whose technical accomplishment serves only to underline the modesty of its ambitions. The image is, in nearly every respect, mistaken. The Dutch still life was, in its mature period, one of the more conceptually charged forms of European art, and the apparent modesty of its subjects is itself part of what makes the form interesting.

The objects depicted are objects of the everyday: a half-peeled lemon, a glass of wine reflecting a window, a partially eaten oyster, a clock, a withered flower, a watch with its case open. Read literally, they are inventories of a comfortably furnished household. Read with attention to the conventions of the period, they are essays in transience, abundance, and the moral peril of attachment to material things. The same lemon that is, on the surface, a beautifully rendered citrus fruit is, by convention, an emblem of how the bright skin conceals the sour content; the same watch is, by convention, a memento of how the day's hours are spent.

The interpretive game would be merely literary if the paintings themselves did not reward it. What makes a strong Dutch still life strong is the simultaneity of registers — the way a viewer can read the painting as a virtuoso display of textures (the wet skin of an oyster, the cold light on pewter) and as a meditation on transience, without either reading exhausting the other. The form was, in this sense, neither symbolic in the medieval allegorical mode (in which every object has a single fixed meaning) nor purely descriptive in the modern photographic mode (in which the object is just what it appears to be); it operated, on its best evidence, in the more interesting space between.

To return to the textbook treatment, then, is to wonder why a form so conceptually rich was, for so long, treated as merely decorative. The most plausible answer is that the lessons academic art history learned from history painting and portraiture — that significance accumulates around grand subjects — proved unsuited to a form whose significance accumulates around ordinary ones. The discipline has, of late, begun to correct the inherited estimate; the corrected estimate has yet to find its way into the standard introductions to European art in which the still life appears, when it appears, as a footnote.