When my family and I were in Oxford last year, I took my two daughters to the Ashmolean Museum almost every week. They loved looking at ancient Egyptian artifacts, Stradivarius violins, and Greek pottery. But perhaps their favorite room was the still life room.
It was tucked away in an upstairs corner, only accessible through opaque glass doors, with dark green walls and glossy wood floors. As soon as you walked in, you felt a hush and a sense of separation from the rest of the museum. You sensed an opportunity to slow down and ponder, quietly, the simple beauties within. I gave my then-6-year-old and 3-year-old a “treasure hunt” list of items to find. As they travelled from painting to painting, they spotted caterpillars, spiders, lemons, pocket watches, knives, cups, butterflies, buttercups, and more. Every week, they spotted different things. Every week, they fell more in love with the “green room.”
Still life artworks were popular amongst Dutch artists in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch Golden Age artists like Rembrandt van Rijn and Judith Leyster sought to capture and celebrate beauty in the ordinary and the everyday. Rembrandt did so through biblical art that was hushed and dark, contrasting with older Scripture-themed artworks. The people he painted could look frumpy, tired, and worn—extremely human, in other words. Leyster and other still life artists conveyed similar ideas, however, by focusing on the inanimate (or tiny animate) objects that make up our world: the half-peeled lemon sitting on a breakfast table. The hourglass we use to track the passage of time. The birds killed to feed and sustain a family.
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