Studio: international art (85.1923)

THE COLLECTION OF MR.
WILLIAM BURRELL a a
(Continued from February Number.)

IF architecture (or is it sculpture i) be
the Cinderella of the arts, still-life, or
as the French have it, nature morte, may
be called the Cinderella of painting. Long
regarded in this country as the prerogative
of the young lady amateur or the pothouse-
dauber, discriminating collectors fought
shy of it, and their attitude was not un-
justified in view of the contemptuous and
patronising pose of the professional painter.
This has never been the feeling of French
artists, and painters of distinction in
France have frequently unbent from more
serious studies and permitted themselves

the relaxation of the most intimate form
of domestic genre. Still-life, not as
artificial arrangement of bric-a-brac, costly
vases, objets d’art, etc., but as the shapes
and colours of familiar things, fruit,
flowers, vegetables, dead game, the litter
of a dining table or a tavern kitchen, even
butcher's meat, et hoc genus omne—seen in
such casual grouping and lighting as we
see them every day—constitute their
subject-matter. And it is to be remarked
that the best still-lifers (sic) are not the
specialists, but rather artists who usually
practise the higher (for after all they are
higher) branches of landscape or figure.
Consider the Burrell pictures alone, the
natures mortes of men so eminent as
Chardin, Courbet, Fantin, Ribot, Bonvin,