Still Life

Late on a sunny morning, the light slides round the edge of a door to the south side of the Saloon. Opening it, you find a handsome high square room with marmalade-coloured walls. A distinguished mirror framed by a large fern faces towards you whilst richly framed paintings are hung two or three high around the walls. This is the so-called Smoking Room where gentlemen would retire to after dinner to smoke their cigars although the 5^th Earl used it to display his archaeological treasures.

It feels a very traditional room, peaceful and still. However, what draws the eye are the paintings – a mixture of landscapes and still lifes. The subject matter of the still lifes is typically commonplace: objects either from nature such as food or flowers, dead animals, rocks and shells and so on, often interspersed with those created by humans such as drinking glasses, books, vases, jewellery and coins.

These days, some people find still lifes slightly gruesome in their depictions of dead animals but the detailed realism and the hidden symbols within such paintings appealed to the growing Dutch middle class of the 17^th and 18^th centuries which is when so many of these paintings date from. It was a secret language. By 1700, the market for still lifes had spread throughout Europe.

Flower paintings in oils became very coveted and were especially prominent in the early 1600s. Their intense colours and shapes feature in many Dutch still lives of this time with tulips becoming particularly popular. Such paintings are a permanent reminder of the Dutch tulip craze which reached its height in 1637 – it is considered the first recorded speculative bubble in history. Tulips were eagerly collected and studied by botanists, painted by artists, and collected by connoisseurs and thus became collectibles both as plants and as art. It all merged to create a very strong market which inevitably went bust.

The term “still life” derives from the Dutch word ‘stilleven’, which became the collective name for the genre from about 1650. Paintings which focused on ‘natures mortes’ were especially popular in the Netherlands during the 17th century and symbolised the themes of material decay and the futility of worldly life – ‘Memento Mori’. Food and flowers appear as symbols of the seasons and of the five senses as well as developing the Roman tradition of the use of a skull in paintings as a symbol of mortality: death makes all equal.

The most impressive painting in the Smoking Room is a still life by the 17th century Dutch artist Jan Weenix. Ironically, although Weenix spent most of his life in Utrecht, many of his best works are to be found in English private collections. The painting’s setting is an imaginary formal parkland similar to those associated with the aristocratic estates being created in the Netherlands in the latter part of the seventeenth century. This forms a romantic, classical backdrop for an array of game and fruit.

Three hundred and fifty years ago Weenix’s work was much admired for its depth of colour and the detail in which he rendered the texture. The famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German polymath and immensely influential writer, devoted a poem to Weenix’s technique. Among his various talents and interests, Goethe himself was a keen amateur artist whose preference for the classical style derived from his belief in its resistance to change and he was much impressed by the Jan Weenix pictures he saw in Munich.

Perhaps it is these classical references and deep colours which create the sense of calm harmony in this room: paintings full of nature and still calm water, of rich textures and deep old fashioned gilt frames. They may be from a different time and world but still have things to teach us today.