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| Vincent van Gogh Still-life with Quinces 1887-88 oil on canvas Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden |
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| Paul Cézanne Still-life with Onions ca. 1896-98 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay,, Paris |
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| Luis Meléndez Still-life with oranges, jars, and boxes of sweets ca. 1760-65 oil on canvas Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas |
"I find myself inclined, my friend, to demonstrate to you how it's exceedingly rare for us to speak the truth without lying. To this end I take a very simple object, a beautiful antique bust of Socrates, Aristides, Marcus Aurelius, or Trajan, and before this bust I place the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, and Naigeon, all three charged with writing their thoughts in a letter to you the next day. The result would be three very different kinds of encomia. To which of them would you subscribe? To the cold assessment of the Abbé? To the epigrammatic, ingeniously phrased verdict of the academician? Or to the ardent text of the younger man? As many different judgments as men. We're each organized differently. None of our sensibilities are exactly alike. We all make use, in our various ways, of an instrument in itself corrupt, employing a dialect prone to express either too much or too little and we address the sounds of this instrument to a hundred people who listen, understand, think, and feel quite differently from one another. Nature has bestowed upon us, in the sensory faculties, a set of little boxes in which it traces the profile of truth. The beautiful, the rigorous, the accurate tracing will be the one that conforms at all points to the impression and so produces its double. The tracings of a man whose senses are acute and who's possessed of exceptional taste will provide the closest approximation. Those of the enthusiast, of the sensitive man with a volatile, hasty, violent, and admiring temperament will omit a great deal; while the tracings of the cold, mean-spirited, jealous critic are deforming. His chisel is directed by ignorance or passion, demarcating lines which diverge first to one side, then to the other. And envy cuts into the profile, resulting in an image which bears no resemblance to anything."
– Denis Diderot, from The Salon of 1767, translated by John Goodman (Yale University Press, 1995)
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| Alexei von Jawlensky Still-life with bottle, bread, and red wallpaper with swallows 1915 oil on cardboard Albertina, Vienna |
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| Roger Fry Still-life with blue bottle 1917 oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art |
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| Juan de Espinosa Still-life with grapes, flowers, shells before 1659 canvas Louvre |
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| Juan van der Hamen Still-life with fruit and glassware 1626 coil on anvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Still-life with primroses, pears, and pomegranates ca. 1890 oil on canvas Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands |
"If these students should be inclined to profit further from my advice, I'd say to them: Hasn't it been long enough for you to see only a portion of the objects you copy? Try, my friends, to imagine that the entire figure is transparent, and that your eyes look out from its center. From there you'll observe the complete exterior disposition of the machine; you'll see how some parts are extended while others are contracted, how the former stretch out while the latter expand; and, consistently preoccupied by the overall effect, by the whole, you'll succeed in showing in that part of the object presented in your drawing everything that would correspond with it but that's not visible, and though displaying only one of its views to me you'll oblige my imagination to envision the opposite view as well; and it's then that I'll write that you're a surprising draftsman."
– Denis Diderot, from The Salon of 1765, translated by John Goodman (Yale University Press, 1995)
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| Anton Faistauer Still-life with fruit on a green cloth 1911 oil on canvas Galerie Belvedere, Vienna |
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| Paul Gauguin Still-life with peaches ca. 1889 oil on canvas Harvard Art Museums |
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| Pedro de Camprobín Writing-desk with small chest and fruit bowl ca. 1630-40 oil on canvas Fundación Banco Santander, Madrid |
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| Louise Moillon Basket of peaches with quinces and plums after 1641 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Claude Monet Jar of Peaches 1866 oil on canvas Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden |
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| Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin Bowl of plums 1728 oil on canvas Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
"Here you are again, great magician, with your silent arrangements! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they have to tell about the imitation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air circulates around your objects! The light of the sun is no better at preserving the individual qualities of the things it illuminates. . . . If it's true, as the philosophers claim, that nothing is real save our sensations, that the emptiness of space and the solidity of bodies have virtually nothing to do with our experience, let these philosophers explain to me what difference there is, four feet away from your paintings, between the Creator and yourself."
– Denis Diderot, from The Salon of 1765, translated by John Goodman (Yale University Press, 1995)