STILL LIVES

Created at the height of the Age of Discovery, many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still life paintings serve as silent testaments to an expanding European understanding of the world. The rise of such paintings as luxury objects contributed to the declining popularity of “cabinets of curiosities,” collections that juxtaposed natural marvels with exotic, manmade “wonders”. While any noble could start a collection, perhaps it was thought, it required true riches to commission paintings of one’s treasures. Assembled from disparate objects in the Mead Art Museum’s collection, this constructed, virtual still life captures the many ways in which such paintings serve as documents of global trade and the commodification of valuable art objects from outside of Europe. Imagine these valuable examples of artistry in ceramics, fiber arts, and wood carefully arranged in a darkened room, waiting for an artist to capture them as signifiers of wealth—and simultaneously diminish their individual histories, artists, and cultures.

While the owner of a wunderkammer might revel in difference and specificity, classifying and arranging only the most appealing of “curiosities,” still life might first appear to mix the exotic with the prosaic. The practice of placing elegant crystal glassware or treasured antiquities alongside a simple plate or a bowl of fresh fruit suggests that painters and their patrons sought to tame the unusual by grounding it in the domestic. Many seemingly quotidian, functional objects featured in still life paintings—from vases, goblets, and pitchers, fruits and vegetables—are themselves intertwined with colonial narratives, and possess hidden trade histories of appropriation that may be lost when they are simply arranged on a table.

A tall, tufted bird stands at the center of a busy design featuring feathers, ferns, and flowers on this Delftware plate, an example of the quintessential Dutch ceramics style of the early modern period. Though Delftware production took place in Europe, expanding from the Netherlandish city of Delft, the iconic blue-and-white ceramics emerged as facsimiles of similar works from China, created exclusively to fit a European demand for the exquisite works. When war and trade reductions in the mid-seventeenth century decreased the supply of Chinese-made ceramics, Delft artisans decided to emulate these delicate ceramics from “the East.” To add an “exotic” touch to these domestic works, artists used images such as bearded sages, sketches of temples, and exotic flowers to form a visual language of early chinoiserie that dominated Delftware designs.

A still life painting might contain images of both Delftware and the Chinese ceramics that inspired it. Perhaps this plate could be set next to an object like a seventeenth-century Chinese jar, featuring the same pure blue that was loved so well by European consumers and collectors. Its grouping of ceramics could be completed with the addition of an object such as this albarello, an example of similar colors and techniques in Italian pottery—ultimately creating a trio of objects in which the lines between local and global, familiar and unknown are indistinguishable.