Who Painted the First Still Life?

Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Self Portrait, 1547. Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

The Getty Museum has recently put on view a small (about 15 by 11-1/2 in.) flower painting by the German Renaissance artist Ludger tom Ring the Younger, a founder of the European still life tradition. Bought last year, Ring's Bouquet of Flowers in a Two-Handled Vase becomes the fulcrum of a group of works assembled since the 1980s, tracking the evolution of still life and nature art through manuscript illuminations, drawings, and paintings. The Ring Bouquet is shown not with contemporary Renaissance works but with the paintings it anticipated: the familiar still lifes of 17th-century Holland, Flanders, and Italy. Such works can be seen at most big American museums, but the Ring is the only such Bouquet picture in a U.S. collection.

Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Bouquet of Flowers in a Two-Handled Vase, early 1560s. J. Paul Getty Museum

Who painted the first still life? Pliny's Natural History claims that Zeuxis (5th-century BC) painted a picture of grapes so realistic that birds tried to peck at it. This would have been a trompe l'oeil still life, as we now use those terms. Zeuxis was real, but all his paintings have long since crumbled to dust. 

Unswept Floor mosaic, 2nd century AD. Vatican Museum

"Unswept floor" mosaics do survive from antiquity. A Roman feast's cast-off morsels cast drop shadows. Showing the remains of a meal, absent the diners, they anticipate the subject of many Dutch still lifes. 

Quian Zuan, Early Autumn, 13th century

Tang dynasty Chinese artists (10th century AD) invented Huaniaohua, bird-and-flower painting in colored ink on silk scrolls. The birds, buds, and bugs are outside and free, in contrast to Western still lifes of cut flowers in vases and picked fruit in bowls. 

Hans Memling, Flowers in a Jug (verso), about 1485. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

A more answerable question might be, what post-medieval European artist painted the first still life? A candidate is Hans Memling. His Flowers in a Jug, dated about 1485, is everything you could ask of a still life, by one of the greatest Netherlandish painters of the Renaissance.

Hans Memling, Young Man in Prayer (recto), about 1485. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Case closed? The other side of the Flowers in a Jug panel is a Memling portrait of young man in prayer. That would have been the painting the sitter commissioned. The flowers were lagniappe. 

It's believed that the Memling portrait was itself part of a diptych, with a Virgin and Child on the facing panel and presumably, another still life subject on its reverse. There are many other early paintings that have painted marble, porphyry, coats of arms, or skulls on the back. 

Hans Memling, Vanitas (verso of left wing of St. John the Baptist and Veronica Diptych, about 1483. Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Vittorio Carpaccio, Letter Rack (verso), about 1490-95. J. Paul Getty Museum

The Getty has an Italian example. Its Carpaccio Hunting on the Lagoon (1490-1495) features a letter rack trompe l'oeil on the back. It's believed that this was originally a cupboard door.

Martin Schongauer, Studies of Peonies, about 1472-1473. Getty Museum. This gouache and watercolor drawing was preparatory to Schongauer's 1473 painting, the Madonna of the Rose Garden

Germany plays a larger role in the history of still life than has often been appreciated. Schongauer and Dürer created nature studies, colored drawings preparatory to nature details in paintings. The Getty has two spectacular examples, along with a unique painted nature picture by Hans Hoffmann. The artist paid homage to Dürer's Young Hare by deepfaking it into a bug's eye view of a forest.

Hans Hoffmann, A Hare in the Forest, about 1585. Getty Museum

Ludger tom Ring the Younger's still lifes help fill in the story. He is best known for his portraits, including a suave self-portrait with brush and palette in Braunschweig (top of post). He did history paintings, too, and is believed to have supplied flowers and vases in portraits by other artists.

Ludger tom Ring the Younger. Left: A Vase with Reddish Brown and Yellow Irises and A Vase with White Lilies, both 1562, Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History. Right: Narcissi, Periwinkle and Violets in a Ewer, 1562. Mauritshuis.

Some time around 1562, Ring made a decisive leap. He created a group of pure still life paintings in oil on panel. These pictures are small, and some have oddly narrow formats. Most employ a white vase that has been identified as alabaster, stoneware, or Venetian milk glass. The vase sits with naive perspective on a shelf against an inky background. Some, such as the panel acquired by the Mauritshuis in 2015, have flowers or cuttings on the shelf below the vase. 

Ring used a blue pigment that has faded with time. In three examples shown here, irises, periwinkles, and violets appear a burnt orange.

Why did Ring create these small, narrow paintings? It's been theorized that they were covers for doors in apothecary shops, wall decorations, or outer wings of a triptych. There are many other examples of painted flowers as architectural decoration, throughout the globe and timeline (as in LACMA's 18th-century Damascus room, which has painted flowers in vases).

Perhaps the pivotal innovation for European still lifes was independent paintings not part of an architectural setting, nor a bonus track verso. The Getty Bouquet may be an example. It is wider than other Ring bouquets, closer to the golden section rectangle. Fortunately it uses less blue than some other bouquets, so the 21st-century color balance must be closer to what Ring intended.

Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Still Life with Wild Roses, Peonies and Other Flowers in a White Earthenware Vase, 1570s(?). Auctioned at Sotheby's, Apr. 22, 2015 

The Getty picture resembles a Ring Still Life with Wild Roses, Peonies and Other Flowers in a White Earthenware Vase sold at Sotheby's in 2015. The Wild Roses still life went for $3.13 million. Sotheby's described it as "the most harmonious of [Ring's] eight still lifes," of which four were in the Westphalian State Museum.

That was before the Getty painting's rediscovery. Ring's bouquets are having a moment, and the attention has brought several examples (and alleged examples) to market since 2015. 

So who painted the first European still life? A good answer must recognize that European artists painted still lifes on the backs of more valued paintings for the better part of a century before they made independent examples. The great Hans Memling was doing flipside still lifes by the mid 1480s. But the lesser-known Ludger tom Ring the Younger may have been the first to paint a fully independent still life, in or about the 1560s. 

Ring's Bouquet of Flowers at the Getty Center, with Dutch, Italian, and Flemish still lifes