Heraclitean Fire

I thought it was about time for a still life. This is Le dessert de gaufrettes by Lubin Baugin, from about 1630. ‘Gaufrettes’ are wafers, in this case ones which have been rolled up like brandy snaps or cannoli. I must say they look a little bit dry like that, but with a few mouthfuls of dessert wine to ease them down, I expect they’re delicious.

I like still lifes; there’s a kind of conceptual purity to them. By which I mean: if the challenge is to make a painting which engages the viewer’s attention, then anything with an actual human in it is pushing against an open door. People are so naturally drawn to faces that they see them everywhere.

But to stick a carafe of water, a couple of books and a pile of fruit on a table, and to make it into something beautiful and precious, something that people want to linger over in a way they would never linger over a real bowl of fruit: that’s magic.

Has there ever been a supposedly great painter who produced as many awful paintings as Renoir? I mean, look at this:

It’s not just the fact that it is, in the least subtle way possible, a painting of a pair of boobs which happen to have a girl attached to them. Or that her arms and hands appear to be suffering from a complete lack of skeletal structure. Or that every one of Renoir’s jeunes filles have interchangeable gormless faces. No, what is most annoying about this painting is that it was painted by the same man who, On a good day, when he was really trying, was capable of occasionally producing paintings like this:

I don’t think it’s a surprise that when I find a painting of his I like, it’s when he’s being least Renoir-y. Although some of his more typical paintings are also rather magical:

Anyway, that seems to be three paintings, which is probably cheating. Better stop before I accidentally post any more.

Yesterday I featured a picture by a great painter of cows. To be fair, Aelbert Cuyp had many other notable qualities, including being a fine painter of skies and light… but one way or another an awful lot of his paintings have cows in. Maybe there were just a lot of cows in C17th Holland; if your country is flooded half the year, grass is a pretty good crop to focus on.

Anyway, here’s another great painting of a cow. But this is a wild cow, the ancestor of domestic cattle: the aurochs. The aurochs actually survived all the way to the seventeenth century before we wiped it out. But this is much older than that.

We don’t know who painted it, of course. Or why, although no doubt there are plenty of theories. What we do know is that fifteen thousand years before the birth of Christ, some people were living down inside a very dark cave in what is now the middle of France, and that on the walls, they painted the wild animals that lived around them: aurochs, horses and stags, especially.

They are beautiful images, I think, but what’s really amazing is their age, and what it says about the deep history of humanity. Before the Egyptians, before the Sumerians, before Çatalhöyük, there had already been hundreds of generations of our ancestors who were at least human enough to produce art. And Lascaux isn’t even the oldest cave art we’ve discovered; the art at Chauvet is another thirteen to fifteen thousand years older. In other words, there is nearly as much time between Chauvet and Lascaux as between Lascaux and us. Recorded history is just a pinprick in comparison.

You can see more of the paintings at the Lascaux website.

Oops, nearly forgot again. I suppose I could cue up a few in advance, but I rather enjoy the semi-random process of picking the paintings.

This is A Herdsman with Five Cows by a River by Aelbert Cuyp.