The earliest European still-life painting is usually attributed to Jacopo de’ Barbari (i.e., Dead Bird, 1504). In Western paintings, still life often appears as a minor feature of the design; but until the 17th century it was not generally painted for its own sake, although it was already traditional to East Asian art. The subject is particularly associated with northern European painting, and the choice of objects very often has a religious or literary significance: wine, water, and bread symbolizing the Passion; skulls, hourglasses, and candles, the transience of life (a genre called vanitas); and selected flowers and fruits, the seasons. Flower painting, especially, held a spiritual and emotional meaning for Japanese artists and for 19th-century European painters, such as Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, and van Gogh. Still life has been expressed in many different ways: Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s witty arrangements of fruit, flowers, and vegetables made into fantastic allegorical heads and figures; the sensuous representation of food by Frans Snyders, Goya, and William Merritt Chase; the trompe l’oeil illusionism of Alexandre-François Desportes and William Harnett; the formal decoration of folk artists or untrained artists such as Henri Rousseau and Séraphine and of modern painters such as Matisse, Dufy, and Pat Caulfield; the semi-abstract designs of Picasso, Gris, and William Scott; and, probably at its highest level of expression, the majestic still lifes of Chardin, Cézanne, and Giorgio Morandi.

Other subjects

Since ancient times, animals and birds have provided the primary subject matter of a painting or have been included in a design for their symbolic importance. In the paintings of prehistoric caves and dynastic Egyptian tombs, for example, animals are portrayed with a higher degree of naturalism than human figures. Their texture, movement, and structure have provided some artists with a primary source of inspiration: the classical, anatomical grace of a George Stubbs racehorse and a more romantic interpretation in the ferocious energy of a Rubens and Géricault stallion; the vivid expression of rhythmically coordinated movements of deer by Tawaraya Sotatsu and Antonio Pisanello; the weight and volume of George Morland’s pigs and Paul Potter’s cows; the humanized creatures of Gothic bestiaries and of Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom; and, finally, Dürer’s The Hare, which is almost as famous as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Increasing interest is shown in notable painters’ versions of other artists’ works. These are not academic copies (such as the study made by Matisse, when a student, of Chardin’s La Raie) but creative transcriptions. Examples that can be appreciated as original paintings are those by Miró of Sorgh’s Lute Player; by Watteau of Rubens’s Apotheosis of James I; by Degas of Bellini’s Jealous Husband; by Caulfield of Delacroix’s Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi; by Larry Rivers of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Mlle Rivière; and by Picasso of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Velázquez’s Las Meñinas, and Delacroix’s Woman of Algiers (which produced Roy Lichtenstein’s Femmes d’Alger, After Picasso, After Delacroix). Picasso has also painted free versions of works by El Greco, Lucas Cranach, Poussin, and Courbet, as Rubens had of Mantegna and Titian, Rembrandt of Persian and Indian miniatures, Cézanne of Rubens and El Greco, and van Gogh of Millet, Gustave Doré, and Delacroix.

In an abstract painting, ideas, emotions, and visual sensations are communicated solely through lines, shapes, colors, and textures that have no representational significance. The subject of an abstract painting may be therefore a proposition about the creative painting process itself or exclusively about the formal elements of painting, demonstrating the behavior of juxtaposed colors and shapes and the movements and tensions between them, their optical metamorphosis and spatial ambiguities. Many abstracts, however, are more than visual formal exercises and produce physical and emotional reactions in the spectator to illusions of shapes and colors that appear to rise and fall, recede and advance, balance and float, disintegrate and re-form; or of moods created of joy, sadness, peace, or foreboding; or of effects produced by light or by flickering or throbbing movement. Some abstracts evoke the atmosphere of a particular time, place, or event; and then their titles may be significant: Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (Robert Motherwell); Late Morning (Bridget Riley); Broadway Boogie Woogie (Piet Mondrian); Gold of Venice (Lucio Fontana); Capricious Forms (Wassily Kandinsky).