Studio: international art (85.1923)

THE COLLECTION OF MR. WILLIAM BURRELL

u THE CROW.” OIL PAINT-
ING BY F. S. BONVIN

etc., not one of whom was anything like
an exclusive practitioner. In Britain
to-day our best exponents of still-life or
flower painting are those of whose general
work it is but a part, and often a small part.

It is true that in the seventeenth century
still-life was born with the Dutchmen and
practised by specialists, the best of whom,
Kalf, van Beijern, Pieter Claesz, Heda,
and one or two more, cannot be said to
have been anything less than artists and
painters. The writer of this has before
him at present a still-life—in which a
plum tart plays an unusual and important
part — by a pupil of Claesz, almost un-
known, whose works are very scarce.
Nothing could be better, pictorially, than
the science and accomplishment, the per-
fect unity, the breadth of treatment of this
homely work of which the aforesaid plum
tart, a piece of cheese, and a napkin form

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the focus. Every quality of good painting
is here—and it is typical, in these respects,
of all the good still-life of the period. 0
Since then the genre has declined and
passed to artists of inferior powers—
eighteenth - century Chardin excepted—
until revived in France by some of the
best all-round painters of what in England
we should call the Victorian era. To
Chardin, and Chardin alone in all Europe,
belongs the credit of carrying on, but in
his own manner, to a further century, the
tradition of still-life—and this not only
in the pictures in which dead objects are
the sole raison d'etre, but also in his
frequent figure subjects where it is quite
obvious that his interest was as much in
the accessories as in the figures. Not that
he allowed the former to predominate un-
duly, but the action of his figures is always
so restrained, so quiet, tranquil, and