Lucie: This is Museum Secrets from the Ashmolean. I’m your host, Lucie Dawkins, and every day I’ll be bringing you a bitesized undercover story from our collections. Step in through the front doors, and join me for some joyful, wonderful, and sometimes bizarre tales hidden in the objects. We will be going behind the scenes and beyond the labels, into dark corners of the storerooms and the minds of the curators.
We are kicking off the season with Xa Sturgis, the Ashmolean’s Director. Here he is.
Xa: Time, I think we can all agree, has been behaving strangely in recent months. It’s both been dragging and racing in almost equal measure, and certainly our recent physical and social confinement has led to a different awareness to the way in which time passes.
Museums are of course natural places to think about the passing of time, and there isn’t a room in the Ashmolean frankly where one isn’t encouraged to do so. But in recent months, one of the rooms I have found myself drawn to is Gallery 48, where you can find a collection of Dutch still life paintings given to the museum in memory of Daisy Linda Ward by her husband in in 1929.
Still life paintings have an endlessly fascinating and paradoxical relationship to time and its passing, that they frequently draw attention to.
Ostensibly, of course, nothing happens in still life. Nothing moves, and nothing changes. And this is one of the reasons why, for the academic theorists of art in the 17th century, they were considered so low rent. There is nothing here, they suggested, of the idealisation and ingenuity, of the invention and imagination and learning that one finds in high academic history paintings.
All a still life painter does is mimic mute and material reality. It’s mere reproduction.
Frankly, this isn’t a view that survives any encounter with any great still life painting. And there are plenty from Gallery 48 to choose from.
Take, for example, the splendid and striking painting by Clara Peeters, with an overflowing basket of fruit in its centre, a vase of flowers on the left, and wine, a jug, coins, and grapes on the right. This is a painting bursting with details and incident, and certainly one of its pleasures is to marvel at the illusionism with which Peeters records the surfaces of cherries or shrimps, of pewter and porcelain, of apples and pears and roses and carnations, and so on.
But from the perspective of passing time, there are two striking paradoxes here.
One is that this is an impossible arrangement. There is no world before refrigeration and air freight in which spring tulips and autumnal grapes, a ripe pear and a flowering carnation or columbine could coexist.
So far from merely recording the visible world, Peeters is here creating a new, sumptuous, bountiful world that can only exist in art.
But the other aspect of so many of the objects here is the state they are in. Everything is on the turn, at the fullest moment of ripeness, in which of course, is contained the beginning of its fading, or rotting. The outer petals of the roses are beginning to turn, the bloom on the grapes is at its fullest. A pear in the fruit bowl has its first signs of rot.
Far from being an image of something static and unchanging, there is huge drama here. This is a world on the brink. Amidst all this plenty is the intimation of its transience.
And making the point explicit, a large fly, drawn to rot and an emblem of mortality, sits on the vase of flowers.
But there is a final way in which still lives encourage thoughts of time, and one that perhaps speaks even more directly to the current moment.
Because they encourage us to spend time. To pause. To look. To think.
Of course, this is true of almost all art, and is one of its pleasures, but there is something about the subject of still life that makes this point particularly forcefully.
Not far from Clara Peeters’ lavish and sumptuous arrangement of fruit and flowers is a much smaller and more modest little painting, by the artist Adrian Coorte, painted about 90 years later, which shows a simple bunch of dramatically lit asparagus, on a stone shelf.
And that’s it.
As we stand in front of this modest work, we get caught up in it. In the details of asparagus, from woody base to curly top, to the layering of their stalks, and the subtle gradations of their colour. Again, we marvel at Coorte’s illusionism. But we also pay attention.
We give asparagus time, in a way we seldom if ever do in life. And realise the rewards of doing so.
There is a joy, there is richness, in even the most modest things. In the here and now, in the local and present. And still life paintings encourage us to find it.
Lucie: If you want to give some time to the Ashmolean’s asparagus, you’ll find gallery 48 on the second floor of the museum. And if you can’t make it into the Ashmolean, all you need to do is follow the link in the podcast notes to see these still lives from you own home.
Join us in the next episode, when we will be heading for the Ashmolean’s cast gallery, with a story about blushing Victorians and scandalous sculptures.
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