Painters all over the world seek inspiration from a thousand different things. Some times it can be an expression of the illusory concept of visual reality (abstract art painting) sometimes it can even be a depiction of nude and semi nude portrayals of female. (figurative paintings) similarly there are ample more movements like Romanticism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Surrealism and so on which have highlighted a painter's need to look out of the box. Still life paintings are one such genre which took wings prior to the 16th century.



On the face of it, it looked to depict general trivial things marking each day's existence. It could be a flower vase; it could also be a simple toothbrush. The idea was to acknowledge the surroundings and thank it for providing so much to the humans. Representation of inanimate objects in natural or man-made motifs came to become a large part of still life paintings. Sometimes people believed it had some thing to do with the Artist's block? and the artist predefined what were the things he was looking out for were. But it was not so. Desire to make still life paintings could sprout from as mundane a thing as a toilet flush or could even find roots from a plant in the garden.

A fruit painted here or a bedspread painted there were a part of still life paintings. Earlier, in the pre renaissance time, these paintings were deeply immersed in religious motifs and allegorical symbolism. They showed the taste of painters to derive simplistic themes of religion in the light of objects. As a trivia, it is worthy of note that the breakfast paintings were a form of still life paintings made during the early centuries. These depicted the objects generally eaten by elites and showed how over indulgence was part of violation of religious codes. Slowly though, the still life paintings began to segregate themselves from the religious codes and started to concentrate on mundane everyday objects.

Still life paintings from the nineteenth century and in fact even in the eighteenth century concentrated more on depicting flowers and fruit. People like Olidon Roden and Paul Gaugin made many such paintings with flowers as a recurring theme. They made an instrumental foray into this art form and showed how technically dull things could be essayed brilliantly on canvas.

With the advent of twentieth century, many new wave movements came to the fore. Top among them were Cubism and Baroque movement. Both of them were partly abstract art forms and showed the illusory concept of visual reality through visual dynamics which did not refer to the general world. Moreover, there were other abstract art forms which changed the entire scope of how painters looked at still life paintings. Paul Cezanne, the pioneer of Impressionism found great inspiration in still life paintings. He believed that it was a form which completely took us away from illustrative or mimetic art and concentrated solely on line, color, form and orientation of a painting.