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Still life   /stɪl laɪf/   Listen
Still life

noun
1.
A painting of inanimate objects such as fruit or flowers.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Still life" Quotes from Famous Books



... another! reach from Lethe's stream The last reviving draught of cool refreshment! Soon shall its waters in my bosom still Life's fitful fever; and my spirit then Adown oblivion's stream shall glide to you, Ye spirits, shrouded in eternal mist. With tranquil pleasure in your deep repose A weary son of earth may lave his soul!— What whisp'ring sounds pervade the dreary grove? ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... those sure and infallible principles of light and colour which Rubens had so successfully disseminated in the Netherlands, were soon found in every department of art. Landscapes, portraits, drolls, and even the dullest and most uninteresting objects of still life, possess irresistible charms and fascination from the magic of those principles. Rembrandt, who, it is said, was never at Venice, might, notwithstanding, have seen, without going out of his country, ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet

... development, however; statutes restrain his young ardor and chill his blood. It is not until the boy is behind the plough in the fields and sunlight that his real life begins—a poor, brutish existence, if you will, but still life. The “Jacques,” half man and half beast, of the Middle Ages is the result of a thousand ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... life, still life ... the high-lights shine Hard and sharp on the bottles: the wine Stands firmly solid in the glasses, Smooth yellow ice, through which there passes The lamp's bright pencil of down-struck light. The fruits metallically gleam, Globey in their heaped-up ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley

... with a face seemingly emaciated with sickness, and a look of patient dejection. A bundle of dirty shreds served him for a pillow, but he had a better support—the arm of a female who kneeled beside him, beautiful as an angel, but with a fading languor in her countenance, the still life of melancholy, that seemed to borrow its shade from the object on which she gazed. There was a tear in her eye—the sick man kissed it off in its bud, smiling through the dimness of his own—when she saw Mountford, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... be given over to the preliminary nervousness of the diocesan clergy, who would one after another look at that steel engraving of Jesus Christ preaching by the Sea of Galilee, and who when they had finished looking at that would look at those two oil paintings of still life, those rich and sombre accumulations of fish, fruit and game, that glowed upon the walls with a kind of sinister luxury. Waiting rooms are all much alike, the doctor's, the dentist's, the bishop's, the railway-station's; they may differ slightly ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... Scotland, was his teacher for a time. Charles Fraser (1782-1860), born in Charleston, South Carolina, of Scottish ancestry, first studied law and retired with a competency. He then took up art and achieved eminent success in miniature painting and as a painter of landscapes, pictures of genre, still life, etc. William Dunlap (1766-1839), artist and dramatist, founder and early Vice-President of the National Academy of Design, was of Ulster Scot descent. His family name was originally Dunlop. Robert Walter Weir (1803-89), of Scots ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black

... war pictures in the past have been merely pictures that happened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes about the manner ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... he said at last with some reluctance. "It's charming. There are some delightful touches—all that still life on the table, it might be a Chardin—and I like the background very ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois

... this conversation the still life of the beautiful cottage was enlivened. A lovely boy played before the door, while a pale mother watched him from within. That pale mother was not yet thirty years of age, yet her cheeks were sunken, her eyes dim, and her hair streaked with silver. Truly, the face was breaking ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes

... time, not in its original body-mask of golden chase-work, which Ptolemaeus Cocces had stolen, but in a casket of glass. Great men "turned to pilgrims" to visit Alexander's grave. Augustus crowned the still life-like body with a golden laurel-wreath, and scattered flowers over the tomb: Caligula stole the breastplate, and wore it during his pantomimic triumphs; Septimius Severus buried in the sarcophagus the writings of the priests, and a clue to the hieroglyphics. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... flat-fish taken in sweep-nets showed brightly white, the steel-blue tints of their backs gradually toning down to the soft transparency of their bellies. However, it was the fat snowy-white barbel that supplied the liveliest brightness in this gigantic collection of still life. ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... the still life of the scene, but above and beyond was congregrated that active, cheerful bustle which springs out of a great multitude bent on enjoyment—cheerful, luxurious, refined, or otherwise, as humanity is always found. Carriages ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... him, not alone for his own but for that of all the words in existence, or as if the ground were giving way under him and he were falling irresistibly from space to space into an awful, infinite, boundless void. His mind refused to work; he asked himself, horrified, whether this was still life, dared call itself life; Nature's glorious structure seemed to him ravaged like a wall rent by a storm, the speaking mouth of all these people struck him as nothing but a chasm convulsively and repellently opening ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... terrible object to look upon, and one that added a new and singular interest to the scene! The world seemed then to be composed almost exclusively of still life, and the body was no impediment to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... be otherwise, when all one's prospect, all one's landscapes, historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life, are nothing but a single line, with no varieties except degrees of ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott

... beauty, but a deal of attraction, in the great flotillas of linked barges and canal-boats which slowly pass like floating and vulgar Venices. If, as is often the case, they lie across the track, we shall have plenty of opportunity to observe at our leisure their still life. I have always thought that canal-life—by reason of its amphibiousness, its phenomenal slowness, its monotony amid endless change, its solitude amid busy and peopled scenes which it is always touching but never entering—must ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... silver spoons of a construction similar to what may sometimes be seen in Flemish pictures of still life, were procured here by Mr. Gore, who bought them from a native, who wore them, tied together with a leather thong, as an ornament round his neck. Mr. Gore gave the ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... one of them, would ever come back again. Brokers' shops, which would seem to have been established by humane individuals, as refuges for destitute bugs, interspersed with announcements of day-schools, penny theatres, petition-writers, mangles, and music for balls or routs, complete the 'still life' of the subject; and dirty men, filthy women, squalid children, fluttering shuttlecocks, noisy battledores, reeking pipes, bad fruit, more than doubtful oysters, attenuated cats, depressed dogs, and anatomical fowls, are ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... of a spotted shell, which he has made altogether sublime by broad truth and large ideality of light and shade; and so I have seen frequent instances of very grand ideality in treatment of the most commonplace still life, by our own Hunt, where the petty glosses and delicacies, and minor forms, are all merged in a broad glow of suffused color; so also in pieces of the same kind by Etty, where, however, though the richness and play of color are greater, and the arrangement grander, there is less expression of light, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... general indignation. But Schaunard had no self respect, above all in the matter of lobsters, and as there was still a portion left, he had the audacity to put it on one side, saying that he would do for a model for a still life piece he had ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... was full of pictures in the widest gold frames, all sorts: landscapes, portraits, cats, dogs, groups of still life, good, bad, and indifferent massed together on a wall covered with large-patterned scarlet and gilt Japanese leather paper. Guarding the doors and staircase were imitation suits of armour on dummy men, standing under some really ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... their former channel, she stood a silent spectator during that dreadful contest between the two roses, pursuing the tenor of still life till the civil wars of Charles I. when she took part with the Parliament, some of whose troops were stationed here, particularly at the Garrison and Camp-hill; the names of both originating ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... did not shine; but the light was hard, white, glittering, and cold, the winds treacherous, the snow wild and restless. There was now comparatively little danger of being lost even in the fiercest storms, but still life in one of these little cabins had an isolation almost as terrible as that of a ship wedged amid the ice-floes ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland

... "Faust" in Hanover in 1797. Goethe's First Part had been five years in print when Spohr composed his "Faust," but it is based not on the great German poet's version of the legend, but on the old sources. This opera has still life, though it is fitful and feeble, in Germany, and was produced in London by a German company in 1840 and by an Italian in 1852, when the composer conducted it; but I have never heard of a representation in America. Between Spohr's "Faust," ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... was not frightened at the situation. He found that even over the level spaces he could scarcely drag his snow shoes, but this had ceased to alarm him as he had been alarmed at first. He went on, hour after hour, weaker and weaker. Within himself there was still life which reasoned that if death were to come it could not come in a better way. It at least promised to be painless—even pleasant. The sharp, stinging pains of hunger, like little electrical knives piercing him, were gone; he no longer experienced a sensation of intense cold; he almost ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood

... grew more close and unbearable; heavy with vapours and odours that had no chance at any time to feel the purification of a draught of free air. Poor cookery, soapsuds, unclean humanity and dirty still life, mingled their various smell in ...
— Trading • Susan Warner

... passed without the summons, and in the morning there was still life. John had been down-stairs for some little time, when he heard the medical man, who had spent the night there, speaking to Arthur on the stairs. 'A shade of improvement' was the report. 'Asleep now; and if we can only drag her through the next few days there ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... made no impression whatever, had successfully established the equilibrium of the glass and the fork, and was now cautiously inserting beneath the latter a section of a roll, the whole forming a charming picture in still life. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... finally in order. As he walked among the perfumed tangles of shrub and flower in his garden, and out towards the sea-shore he was impressed by the great silence everywhere around him. Everything looked like a moveless picture—a study in still life. Passing through a little olive wood which lay between his own grounds and the sea, he paused as he came out of the shadow of the trees and looked towards the height crowned by the Palazzo d'Oro, where from the upper windows twinkled a few lights showing the position ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli



Words linked to "Still life" :   painting, picture



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