While still life dates back as far as early Roman antiquity, it flourished in the Netherlands during the early 1600s or what was known as the Dutch Flemish golden age of art. This period existed during the Baroque period of art. Still lifes were the artists forum to display skill in painting objects in a realism style with great detail and dramatic lighting effects. A literal cornucopia of food, tableware and intricate cloth patterns and subtle folds in table cloths and flowers all challenged painters.
Several types of subject were recognised: dinner settings, breakfast settings.
Virtually all still lifes had a moralistic message, usually concerning the brevity of life – The Vanitas motif, (from Latin vanitas, “vanity”), in art, a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. A vanitas painting contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; it exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and to repent. The vanitas evolved from simple pictures of skulls and other symbols of death and transience frequently painted on the reverse sides of portraits during the late Renaissance. It had acquired an independent status by c. 1550 and by 1620 had become a popular genre. Its development until its decline about 1650 was centred in Leiden, in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, an important seat of Calvinism, which emphasized humanity’s total depravity and advanced a rigid moral code. However, in the case of Balthasar van der Ast and his students, their still-life paintings were often painted and bought for decorative purposes. These did not feature skulls, candles and hourglasses. There was wealth in the Netherlands, a growing middle-class, and money was spent on purchasing art. Flowers, fruit and grapes were deemed pleasant subjects to look at.