IN THE opening chapter of the catalogue for this exhibition that Simon Martin and his colleagues brought together in record time since last summer, Martin writes of a blue wicker basket of 17 Sicilian lemons that Christopher Wood (1901-30) painted in 1922.
Although not in the present exhibition, it is on display in “Christopher Wood; Sophisticated Primitive” elsewhere in the Queen Anne house alongside his China dogs in a St Ives window and two other pictures newly bequeathed to the gallery.
Wood’s assessment of still life informs the show: “I think it is a means of expressing one’s thoughts in a delicate manner which everyone else can’t quite understand.” Maybe his erratic wartime education at Marlborough and Malvern had drawn Wordsworth’s encomium to his attention: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
That confident viewpoint of a 21-year-old provoked the thought of how “still life” may differ from the natura morta or la nature morte of the Catholic Continent. Is it about the quietude of living things or the death of nature?
The exhibition itself begins with two earlier works by Dutch immigrant artists of the 17th century, Edwaert Collier (c.1640-c.1707) and Simon Verelst. It declares its hand for the Netherlandish Protestant view of stillleven (motionless life). In April 1669, Samuel Pepys was tempted to buy one of his flowerpot paintings and offered a mere £20. The artist wanted £70 for it. And so to bed. A Dutch friend of mine drew my attention to a remark of Rembrandt of een stil leggent leven: something that is alive that is just resting.
The exhibition makes obvious the links between still life and affluent materialism in the Golden Age of Dutch painting and how such links are explored contrariwise by Pop Art in the 1960s. Soup tins, cardboard tea packets, a coffee grinder, a box camera, and kitchen aids and utensils are as much a sign of wealth and capitalism as some of the more decorous handmade items that feature in earlier painting.
Tate: Purchased 1945Ben Nicholson, 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall) (1943-45), oil and graphite on canvas
Bringing together nearly 150 works, including several recent commissions, the exhibition showcases some 100 artists, including David Hockney, Alison Watt, William Roberts (whose risqué picture of an artist in his studio contemplating a skull while trying to ignore the couple having sex on the bed painted behind him dates to 1948), Rachel Whiteread, and Prunella Clough.
At 24, Mary Moser was the youngest founder member of the Royal Academy and the first woman to be elected alongside Angelica Kauffman (Arts, 3 May). Her sprawl of summer flowers lacks the lightness and brilliance of Vanessa Bell’s design for an Omega bedhead and Winifred Nicholson’s study of vermilion and mauve.
This is disappointing, as she shows strongly in the current Tate Britain exhibition of British women artists 1530-1920 (“Now You See Us”, to 13 October). Two watercolours of flowers from the ambitious “Zodiac” series of 1765 and oil paintings for the Seasons (c.1780) (Spring and Summer, both RA) amply demonstrate why Queen Charlotte had a room at Frogmore decorated with her still lifes.
John Craxton painted his Hare on a table between 1944 and 1946, while his intimate friend of the time, Lucian Freud, drew out the textures of an unripe tangerine on Poros in October 1946.
Both testify to wartime loss, lockdowns, food shortages, and a desire for freedom, even if, as Keith Vaughan noted, once the wartime blackout was over and street lamps were lit again, “There is no true illumination. . . The world is still dark.”
Despite the origin of much still-life painting in the religious tradition of memento mori, many of the objects portrayed here have a life of their own. No longer as the attributes of a saint — an open book, a pot of ointment, or whatever — or of flowers with coded spiritual virtues and Christian meaning, the things become the theme that is portrayed.
“The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain” is at Pallant House Gallery, 9 North Pallant, Chichester, until 20 October. Phone 01243 774557. pallant.org.uk