Saturday, December 3, 2016

French Still Life Paintings, 19th century

Henri Fantin-Latour
Still life with Roses and Fruit
1863
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Henri Fantin-Latour
Still life
1866
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"What is it about colors that seems to obstruct our understanding? They are given to visual experience along with shapes, yet we have no similar difficulties with shapes. A crucial difference seems to be that the essential character of shapes is amenable to mathematical representation, but the essential nature of colors resists it; the one appears quantitative, the other qualitative. Shapes are given to more than one sense, and we are much inclined to suppose that the only sort of characteristics that can be accessible to more than one sensory mode are those which bear a structure. The study of structures is, of course, the special province of that form of discursive thinking par excellence, mathematics. And, it goes without saying, everything mathematizable is a proper object of scientific study."

"Colors, on the other hand, have a brute factuality about them. From Locke and Hume to Moore and Russell, they have been taken to be the paradigmatic instances of simple unanalysable qualities. But the supposed unanalysability of colors, obvious though it has seemed to many reflective people, does not coexist comfortably with the equally apparent 'internal relatedness' of colors, whereby they exclude  yet intimately involve  each other. There is no variation of magnitude, intensive or extensive, that connects every color with every other color. And yet colors are as systematically related to each other as are lengths or degrees of temperature. Red bears on its face no reference to the character of green. Yet red categorically excludes green while at the very same time resembling it in an incommensurably closer fashion than the resemblance of either red or green to any shape or sound."

 from Color for Philosophers (1988) by C.L. Hardin

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Still life with Peaches
1881
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Still life with Peaches & Grapes
 1881
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Paul Cézanne
Apples
1878-79
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Paul Cézanne
Still life with Apples & Primroses
c. 1890
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Paul Gauguin
Still life
1891
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Paul Gauguin after Cézanne
Still life with Teapot & Fruit
1896
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Camille Pissarro
Still life with Apples & Pitcher
1872
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Bouquet of Lilacs
1875
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

Henri Fantin-Latour
Vase of Chrysanthemums
ca. 1875
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Henri Fantin-Latour
Still-life of flowers
1860
Hermitage, St Petersburg

Henri Fantin-Latour
Still life with pansies
1874
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Henri Fantin-Latour
Potted Pansies
1863
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York