The still life was once regarded as the absolute nadir of art. It is an interesting fact that writing and art once had hierarchies of genre. The most important written genre was the epic. In painting, the historical scene had the top position. The list went like this:

  1. Historical
  2. Portrait
  3. Genre (everyday life)
  4. Landscape
  5. Animal
  6. Still Life

Then, in the nineteenth century, the Romantics pushed landscape and animal paintings to the top. A rearguard push by the Pre-Raphaelites to preserve historical paintings failed. Realists started painting genre pieces and the impressionists, landscapes. Women, forbidden to attend drawing classes because of nude models, were pushed to paint portraits and landscapes.

I love still life, you can say a lot in the assembly of a few choice items. It is a genre that goes back to Greco-Roman times