"French taste"

A taste for Flemish and Dutch still life in 18th-century France encouraged Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin to produce his masterpieces of the genre. Still life was much cultivated by the great artists of 19th-century France, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Pierre-August Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh providing great examples, though the objects themselves became increasingly unimportant for these artists, as their interest in still life was motivated more by the study of light and colour. Cubism carried this process a stage further in breaking through surface appearance, though the cubist still life retains a suggestion of familiar things. Although a still life can tend towards abstract art, it stops short of complete abstraction.