Jug and Bottle

Peter Campbell

• Morandi edited by Ernst-Gerhard Güse and Franz Armin Morat
  Prestel, 168 pp, £29.95, May 1999, ISBN 3 7913 2086 6

Of all the gratifications painting offers, the pleasures which come by way of pictures of pots, bowls, fruit, game, bread, bottles and so forth are the least explicable in terms of other appetites. Still-lifes do not charm topographically, arouse erotically or excite physiognomicaily. They do not, despite often showing food, do as much as they might to make the mouth water. The greatest of them are celebrations of frugality. Cézanne’s apples, Chardin’s peaches and Morandi’s jugs rebuke the gleaming succulence of the lobsters and fish, the rich crumbling pies, even the crisp linen, which make the paintings of 17th-century Dutch masters the ancestors of photographic illustrations in cookery books – although, to be fair, those illustrations also find models in the work of painters who turned, not to the splendour of the feast, but to the coolness of the larder. The surfaces of the greatest still-lifes are more often floury or waxy than glazed; the objects are solidly there, sparingly translucent. They may glow, they do not glitter. Matisse had to have the real thing – girl or oyster – in front of him when he painted. And it had to be fresh: for one still-life he renewed his oysters every day and had a boy on hand to water the fish for another. The results are delicious, but only metaphorically mouthwatering.