"Still life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arranged, as may be well seen in an etching of Rembrandt's 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 ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... 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 bowl, And there are faces against ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... all, there is no picture of flowers, or still life, or even of landscape, that will interest long. You must be very solitary here at times—that is, you must have a great deal more resource than I, or, indeed, almost anyone I know, or this solitude must at times be oppressive. I hope so, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and fast and far they hied O'er dale and desert, wood and plain, each to his ingle-side! They hid themselves so closely that no hunter cared to roam Where these the timid subjects each had fashioned him a home! They were too wise for Teddy and they still life's blessings share, Though Teddy went a-huntin' them all ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... could while there was still life left in the herd, but the cattle were too far gone for droving. We managed to collect a hundred or so—sent them in trucks from Crocodile Creek Terminus, for boiling down and netted about thirty shillings a head on them. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... London is dull, in the way of West Eend people, the country, I guess, is a little mucher. Life in the country is different, of course, from life in town; but still life itself is alike there, exceptin' again class difference. That is, nobility is all alike, as far as their order goes; and country gents is alike, as far as their class goes; and the last especially, when they hante travelled none, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... into the relative period and circumstances of the artists who created it. The landscape background, the rocky defile, the wooded declivity, and the trees laden with fruit, are all eminently beautiful. The eye would almost lose itself in this rich sense of still life if it were not constantly led back to the interest ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Bob, "there seems to be as little of still life about him just now, as there is about Hookey Walker. But pray who is that dingy gentleman who passed us within the last minute, and who appeared to be an object of attraction to some persons on the opposite side—he appears to have been cut ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... poisonous vipers, wherever they may be, and in the sight of all suspend them like a banner. Let the wounded look upon them, perhaps they will be cured—perhaps there is still healing for their ills, perhaps there is still life in them!" ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... the leading incidents of a celebrated picnic in the woods which once occurred; although, possibly the uninitiated might experience some little difficulty at first in discriminating between what were meant for the figures of the principal personages of the story and the objects of still life depicted in the drawing, though otherwise it was an admirable work ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... saunter away the remainder, be it more or less, of an agitated and active life, now reduced (and I am not sure that I am a loser by the change) to so quiet and serene a one, that it may properly be called still life. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... an abundance of still life in the Gardens at this ungenial season. We find the Elephant, the Antelopes, and the Zebra, in their winter quarters, and their mightinesses, the large cats, as the lions, tiger, and leopards, accommodated with a snug fire. The tropical birds, as the parrots, maccaws, &c., have been removed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature's own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet of still life—if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing atmosphere—and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed. Grace descended the green escarpment by a zigzag path into the drive, which swept round beneath the slope. The exterior ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... whose dreamy calm the accident had 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
... duck pond. He was a bit of still life; a chip; weak water gruel; a tame rabbit, boiled to rags, without sauce or salt. He received my arguments with his mouth open, like a poorbox gaping for half-pence, and, good or bad, he swallowed them all without any resistance. We could n't ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... 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 ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... door, the air 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 ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... cannot know. The eye that looks around upon a landscape sees everything but itself. It is just as a man may look in the glass and see himself there every day; but he sees only the framework, only the "still life" in his face; he does not see it in the free play of expression,—in the strong workings of thought and feeling. I was one day sitting with Robert Walsh in Paris, and there was a large mirror behind him. Suddenly he said, "Ah, what a vain ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... traveler raised the sash and looked impatiently up the idle track; and he had dismissed all doubt when Smith, conversing with the apathetic brakeman, crisply indicated his desire to return from a study of still life to the moving picture show for which he had paid admission. The elderly Bostonian had observed many New Yorkers, but it had never ceased to be a source of surprise to him why they all should be so incessantly restless with ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... wonders of the world: that of it you get no idea from descriptions, or even from paintings. Of the 'Mammoth Cave' you have a conception from what you are told; of the Natural Bridge you get a really truthful impression from a picture. But cave and bridge are in still life. Niagara is all activity and change. No picture gives you the varying form of the water or the change of color; no description conveys to your mind the ceaseless roar. So, too, the ocean must be unrepresentable to those who ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... possibly, too, they cannot look singularly without risks in the direction of slyness and brazen archness; or talk animatedly without dipping in slang. Conventional situations preserve them and interchange dignity with them; still life befits them; pre-eminently that judicial seat from which in briefest speech they deliver their judgements upon their foreign sisters. Jealousy it was that plucked Cecilia from her majestic place and caused her to envy in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... understand the laws of Karma, we must free ourselves from Karma. The conquest of covetousness brings this rich fruit, because the root of covetousness is the desire of the individual soul, the will toward manifested life. And where the desire of the individual soul is overcome by the superb, still life of the universal Soul welling up in the heart within, the great secret is discerned, the secret that the individual soul is not an isolated reality, but the ray, the manifest instrument of the Life, which turns it this way and that until the great work is accomplished, the age-long lesson learned. ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... there is no suggestion of death in such a scene. It is only that of slumber! for the ocean undulates even when at rest, and sails flap gently even when there is no wind. Besides this, on the particular morning to which we call attention, a species of what we may call "still life" was presented by a mighty iceberg—a peaked and towering mountain of snowy white and emerald blue—which floated on the sea not a quarter of a mile off on the starboard bow. Real life also was presented ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... standard lies Of the great God who rules the skies. When low upon the earth was laid The lord whom Vanar tribes obeyed, Dark as a moonless sky no more His land her joyous aspect wore. Though low in dust and mire was rolled The form of Bali lofty-souled, Still life and valour, might and grace Clung to their well-loved dwelling-place. That golden chain with rich gems set, The choicest gift of Sakra,(585) yet Preserved his life nor let decay Steal strength and beauty's light away. Still from that chain divinely wrought His dusky form a glory ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... shelter made of leaves and branches, and taking a series of magnificent snap-shots of wild birds and animals, like those in the books by Cherry Kearton, and she certainly intended to secure records of the sports at school. In the meantime she must content herself with landscape and still life. "I'll have one of the de Claremont tomb, at any rate," ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... he was able to make from nature in his early years, are chiefly of fishing-boats, barges, and other minor marine still life; and his better acquaintance with this kind of shipping than with the larger kind is very marked in the Liber Studiorum, in which there are five careful studies of fishing-boats under various circumstances; namely, Calais Harbor, Sir John Mildmay's Picture, Flint Castle, Marine ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... 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 and shutting, darkness ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... "Still life doesn't interest me," he declared. "Bones are bones, after all, you know. I don't even care who my grandfather was, much less who my grandfather a million times removed might have been. Let's step into the study for a moment, Professor, if you don't ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... high and true, without being obtrusively good. Such a book is as great a relief amid the sensational stories of the day, as a quiet little bit of "still life" is to the eye, after being blinded by the glaring colors of ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... work, beside the special knowledge of a lifetime, would be needed to copy—even to copy—this picture. Mr. So-and-so, R.A., could undoubtedly draw the bird; Mr. Such-another (equally R.A.) the bear; and scores of gentlemen the still life; but who would be the man to pull the whole thing together and make it the riotous, tossing cataract of colour and life that it is? And when it was done, some middle-aged person from the provinces, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought. The old opinions in religion, morals, and politics, are so much discredited in the more intellectual minds as to have lost the greater part of their efficacy for good, while they have still life enough in them to be a powerful obstacle to the growing up of any better opinions on those subjects. When the philosophic minds of the world can no longer believe its religion, or can only believe ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... in a real fight. Mapela, give 'Mfuni thy spear. And, hark ye, 'Mfuni, if thou canst slay the white man, or even disable him, thou shalt choose twenty head of cattle from mine own herd, and they shall be thine. But if the white man proves to be the victor in the fight, and there is still life in thee when it is over, I swear, by the bones of my royal father, that thou shalt be given to the ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the paintings on the walls in the roofless chambers of both cities, or carefully removed to the museum at Naples, are as fresh and plain, as if they had been executed yesterday. Here are subjects of still life, as provisions, dead game, bottles, glasses, and the like; familiar classical stories, or mythological fables, always forcibly and plainly told; conceits of cupids, quarrelling, sporting, working at trades; theatrical rehearsals; poets reading their productions ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... connection with the arts and since he might no longer act he began to paint. He took me to his studio and showed me his work. It was not at all bad, but not what I should have expected from him. He painted nothing but still life, very small pictures, perhaps eight by ten; and he painted very delicately, with the utmost finish. He had evidently a passion for detail. His fruit pieces reminded you of the fruit in a picture ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... sketches; heads, still life, landscapes, all subjects alike interested the painter. A rugged bust of Verdi, over life size, modeled in plaster, stood in one corner. On an easel rested a spirited portrait of Maurel, done ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... sordid, but still life, with its tavern corners and its brute pleasures of food and drink and warm sleep, living hands to hold and living laughter to gladden me—or a week of cloth of gold, of glory, of ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and I know not what else; then all kinds of town life—courtyards of inns, starting of mail coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, etc.; then all kinds of inner domestic life—interiors of rooms, studies of costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes of symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local incident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish, being specifically drawn, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 bowl, And there are faces against the night Of the outer room—faces that seem Part of this still, still life ... they've ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... I don't mind saying that Dick told me when I first rode up to the corral that you and Mose were both boozing up to beat the band; and right after that we heard a deuce of a racket up here, and it did look—" He waved an apologetic hand at Mose and the fragments of pottery which framed like a "still life" picture on the floor, and let it go at that. "I'm strong for you, Ford," he added, and his smile was frank and friendly. "Double Cross is the name of this outfit, but I'm all in favor of running that brand on the cow-critters and keeping it out ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... the porphyry from Egypt. We might descant upon the lavish wall-paintings, representing landscapes real and imaginary, scenes from mythology and semi-history, floating figures, genre pictures, and pictures of still life; or upon the mosaics in floor and wall depicting similar subjects and often serving to the occupants not so much in the place of pictorial art as in the place of wall-papers and of Brussels or Kidderminster ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the sixteen figures were as lively as in a Hogarth, with more refinement. Leslie was completely in sympathy with Queen Anne's time, and reproduced it with unfailing zest and knowledge. He had been very careful about details. The interior at Hampton Court had been painted on the spot, and all the still life in the picture, even to a fan, had been studied with equal accuracy. Mrs. Leslie's mother sat looking at the picture, and making the liveliest comments on the subject and the actors. She would get up without hesitation to see something ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... picture of still life. That of animated nature was not less picturesque. Cows bellowed, and cart-horses neighed, and pigs grunted, and geese gabbled, and ducks quacked, and cocks and hens flapped and fluttered promiscuously, as ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... a continuance of the Greek, characterized by dark and rich backgrounds, which were frequently black, red or deep yellow and dark blue, on which figures and landscapes, or animals, or groups from still life, were executed in bright colorings of powerful contrasts. Black and white were used, and later, when the Byzantine artists and craftsmen found their way to Western Italy, they spread this love of bold coloring, ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... Rome must perish; for faith in the gods was lost, and so were strict habits! Rome must perish; and it was a pity, for still life was pleasant there. Caesar was gracious, wine was good! Oh, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... upon the Dahar-es-Salahh, a mountain whence the prospect of all Philistia and the coast from almost Gaza to Carmel expands like a map—no, rather like a thing of still life before the eye, with the two seas, namely, the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, visible at once, with likewise the mountains of Samaria and Gerizim, besides the Moab country eastward, and ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... who had not heard the introductory speech of the showman, absolutely thought that it was on inanimate figure made to imitate a man that was before them, as the orator always designated his piece of still life his mecanique, which means machine; in order to afford every one the benefit of a close examination, he lifted up his automaton, then flumped him directly opposite and close to the persons who formed part of the circle and whom he judged ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... living here, I think, affect him in much the same way that those magazines do me, and I wonder if every one, except a dyspeptic, doesn't secretly like to hear and see these very things! Could it be the reason people used to paint so much still life?—baskets of fruit, a hunter's game-bag, a divided melon, etc. I frankly own that they would thrill me more if I knew their market price, so that I might be imagining what delightful meals I could offer my family without straining the household purse, which is my excuse for the intimate ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... the men of facts despise design. This is the error of the common Dutch painters, of merely imitative painters of still life, flowers, &c., and other men who, having either the gift of accurate imitation or strong sympathies with nature, suppose that all is done when the imitation is perfected or sympathy expressed. A large body of English landscapists come into this class, including most clever sketchers from ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... of a vague sensibility, or, to say the same thing in another way, the creation of indefinite beauty. However much an artist may have felt, he cannot just sit down and express it; he cannot create form in the vague. He must sit down to write a play or a poem, to paint a portrait or a still life. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... 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
... not speak here of the Dutch school, whose highest aim, and highest praise, is exquisite mechanical precision in the representation of common nature and still life: but of those pictures which are the productions of mind, which address themselves to the understanding, the fancy, the feelings, and convey either a moral or ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... is not one of still life. Over the shrubbery I can see the white-painted gates leading to the mansion, and outside of these runs the Levee road. Although the foliage hinders me from a full view of the road itself, I see at intervals the people passing along it. In the dress of the Creoles the sky-blue colour ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... 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 in which fighting men and horses ought to be represented, but ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... mediocrity. Among them are the productions of many of the more humble painters of genre subjects—the class who delight in portraying homely cottage interiors, or troops of playing children, or bits of minutely-finished still life—or careful academical studies of groups with all the conventions duly observed: this class of pictures musters strong, and connoisseurs, without so much remarking their imperfections, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... 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
... born just before his father's death, and upon whom she doated, was a magnificent piece of still life. Calm, placid, dignified, an infant Hercules for strength and fair proportions, grave as a judge, quiet as a flower, he was, in point of age, exactly at that most delightful period when children are very pleasant to look upon, and require no other sort of notice whatsoever. Of course this ...
— Country Lodgings • Mary Russell Mitford
... schools at once, but raise the men as high as you can, and then let them stoop as low as you need; no great man ever minds stooping. Encourage the students, in sketching accurately and continually from nature anything that comes in their way—still life, flowers, animals; but, above all, figures; and so far as you allow of any difference between an artist's training and theirs, let it be, not in what they draw, but in the degree of conventionalism you ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... kukri, struggled through the arresting creepers and undergrowth to where the stag lay feebly moving its limbs. Seizing one horn he performed the hallal, that is, he cut its throat to let blood while there was still life in the animal, muttering the short Mussulman creed as he did so. For his religion enjoins this hygienic practice—borrowed by the Prophet from the Mosaic law—to guard against long-dead carrion being eaten. At the touch of the Colonel's hand Badshah sank to ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... did not remain special to German national literature, but became popular subjects in the literature of the whole world; and it is a significant fact that they afterwards took root especially in Flanders, where the taste for still life and delight in Nature has always found a home, and which became the nursery, in later times, of landscape, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... qualifications, without the least retrospective regard to the rank or merit of their ancestors. Yes, refined reader, we are hastening to that goal of perfection, where satire dares not show her face; where nature is castigated, almost even to still life; where humour turns changeling, and slavers in an insipid grin; where wit is volatilised into a mere vapour; where decency, divested of all substance, hovers about like a fantastic shadow; where the salt of genius, escaping, leaves ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... unsheltered depot platform, where everybody was in the agony of trying to compress half an hour's work into the fifteen minutes' stop of the long express train. The day was so hot that even the group of idlers which usually formed the still life of the picture was out of sight on the shady side of the buildings. Hackmen bustled noisily about; baggage masters were busier and crosser than ever; there was the usual melee of leave-takings ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ghosts and marble halls. It was a symbol of Rajput womanhood—strong and beautiful, withdrawn from the clamour of the market-place, given over to her dreams and her gods. For though kings have deserted Amber, the gods remain. There is still life in her temples and the blood of sacrifice on her altar stones. Therefore she must not be approached in the spirit of the tourist. And, emphatically, she must not be approached in a motor-car; at least so far as Thea's guests were concerned. Of course one knew she was approached ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... been a minute before the four, did not look back. There were still life and strength in them, and the power to run. The Ohio could not be far away now, and they ought to strike it ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... by his bed was a stout sheet of packing paper. On this lay, like one of those pictures in still life that one sees on suburban parlor walls, a tongue, some bread, a knife, a fork, salt, a corkscrew and a ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... 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 dashed in and out of the crowd, the ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... see!" Could there be a stranger one than a decent-looking middle-aged man lying on his chest in the verandah, raised on his elbows, and intently reading a book, clothed only in a pair of spectacles? Besides that curious piece of still life, women frequently drew water from a well by the primitive contrivance of a beam suspended across an upright, with the bucket at one end and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Two 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 spoons to Sir ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Wings! Yes, wings that beat, beat on the air and left one moving behind a blue dress, under a jaunty hat like all other jaunty hats. But something else moved elsewhere. There were two worlds for her. But not for Erik. One world for Erik. Where would his wings take him? Beyond life there was still life. A wall of life that never came to an end or a top. That was the one world for Erik. Hurl himself against it, higher, higher. Soar till the superfluous ones became little dots on a ribbon ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... and massive bases, and, sweeping upwards, told of illimitable tracts beyond—mighty waves on the surface of the world's great inland seas, on whose crests sat the green and purple foam of herbage, and in whose hollows lay the still life of home and pasture. Silent, changeless, secure, perpetual sublimity rested on their summits, and unbroken repose lay along their graceful sweeps. They were the joy-bearers to the poor child of sorrow, who with eager eye looked out on their morning revelations. To ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is quite incomprehensible. The great political revolution of the nineties could never have been a product of the rigid Pigtail age, but it could very well have been a result of the Rococo in the Pigtail. In the Rococo there was still life, mad, ungovernable life; the Pigtail always had a Hippocratic face. The virtuosos of personality, the strange Rococo original types, were the forbears of the literary Storm and Stress writers, the artistic reformers, the big and little demagogues. The pedants of the Pigtail, on the other ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices our still life ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... 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 be a unique existence, a modus vivendi quite apart from other ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Gabrielle became familiar with a number of dining-rooms furnished in mahogany and horsehair and hung with opulent studies of still life in oils and engravings after Mr. Frith. The meal was usually served by the whiskered coachman, who wore, for the occasion, a waistcoat decorated with dark blue and yellow stripes, and there was always cake for lunch. After the port, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... no; no talent. You are wrong, my father. I know myself. I am not of those to whom nature gives talents. I am born only for still life. I have no taste except for privacy. The convent is more suited to ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... that is just what I can't see. What he has got, and what you can't take away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the world; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... cleanly chamber, and be fed and cared for upon terms that seemed absurdly small, even to a person of my limited means. My cordial hostess brought me a meal which was positively luxurious; broiled ham and poached eggs, such as one scarcely hopes to see out of a picture of still life; crisp brown cakes fresh from that wonderful oven whose door I had seen yawning open in the Flemish interior below; strong tea and cream—the cream that one ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... farthest was too distant to raise his spirits by its contemplation: it was a high, wearisome abode. As soon as he had completed this examination, and found there was nothing to occupy him, he turned his attention to the white bird in the cage. Here was still life; and if the cage was narrow, yet the prisoner could hop about on the different perches. Soon it remained still, and looked at him with its bright eyes; and it seemed as if sense and speech lay in these eyes, ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any exceptionally ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... out. But no; I see his hair far down, close under the stern of the boat I plunge in, and diving, grasp it and bring him to the surface. The boat has forged ahead. With difficulty I get him alongside, and we are hauled on board. The young man has still life in him, but cannot speak. We pull back to the ship, more than once narrowly escaping being swamped. It is some time before the stranger can speak. Even then he does not seem willing to say much. He does not mention the name ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... As they lingered floating upon the waters, a tiny boat shot from beneath a cliff below them, and was propelled swiftly down the river. In it was a female rendered conspicuous by a scarlet shawl, and in the still life around them, this boat became an object of interest. It was only for a moment, the young people were too deeply occupied with their own feelings to dwell upon even this picturesque adjunct to a scene which was now flooded gorgeously with the sunset. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... character and expression, but he gives them with perfect truth and accuracy. This is, in fact, what distinguishes his compositions from all others of the same kind, that they are equally remote from caricature, and from mere still life.... His faces go to the very verge of caricature, and yet never (we believe in any single instance) ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the vessel was absolutely and 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 of the room where the "master ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... was foul; he threw it down with an exclamation of disgust. Its foulness was symbolic; everything was out of kilter. He looked at the picture he had been painting for a week—rotten! It was a still life; a broken jar and three books on a rag of Persian embroidery. Picking up his pen-knife he deliberately cut the canvas out of the stretcher, and setting a match to a corner of it, tossed it in the empty stove. He paced up and down the room wondering ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... genius, must know that he entertained the greatest horror of being mistaken for a caricaturist pure and simple; and although he executed caricatures for special purposes, they may literally be counted on the fingers. "His pictures," says Hazlitt, "are not imitations of still life, or mere transcripts of incidental scenes and customs; but powerful moral satires, exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners, in all their tendencies, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... failure of his early attempt to play the deliverer to Israel, he nourished further designs of that sort. He appears to have settled down quietly to be Jethro's son-in-law, and to have lived a modest, still life of humble toil. He had flung away fair prospects,—and what had he made of it? The world would say 'Nothing,' as it ever does about those who despise material advantages and covet higher good. Looking after sheep ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... adjoining the invalid's cottage. Walter Douglas, then but twenty-six, was his private secretary. Walter and Hortense met in the quiet, woodland paths. It is difficult to know just what the mutual attractions were. She had received many advantages which had not been his, still life was certainly a lonely thing for her. He was her first real interest since she had left Washington, and love reawakened and blew into life the embers she thought were gray-cold. It was never to be the flaming love-fire of ten years before, but it was bright enough to decide her to ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... life, when you know that ——[1038] was loaded with wealth and honours; a man who had acquired his fortune by such crimes, that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat.' BOSWELL. 'You will recollect, Sir, that Dr. Robertson said, he cut his throat because he was weary of still life; little things not being sufficient to move his great mind.' JOHNSON, (very angry.) 'Nay, Sir, what stuff is this! You had no more this opinion after Robertson said it, than before. I know nothing more offensive than repeating what one knows to be foolish things, by way ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... laborious little studies of still life or nature, the public would have none. Even the two life-sized pictures, which had more than a little merit in them, remained unpurchased. Both were for sale now; for Joseph needed no portrait of what was his; and Prince G—— naturally never ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... 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 its ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... scarcely to have proceeded from the same general stock. The different rules and regulations which presided over each department of art, followed of course; every mode of excellence, from the grand style of the Roman and Florentine schools down to the lowest rank of still life, had its due weight and value—fitted to some class or other; and nothing was thrown away. By this disposition of our art into classes, that perplexity and confusion, which I apprehend every artist has at some time experienced from the variety of styles, and the variety of excellence with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... door. But he suddenly changed his mind and came back. 'Just listen, Lantier,' he said, in the honeyest of tones; 'I want a lobster painted. You really owe me that much after fleecing me. I'll bring you the lobster, you'll paint me a bit of still life from it, and keep it for your pains. You can eat it with your ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... know where to look, in the whole range of contemporary fictitious literature, for pictures in which the sober and the brilliant tones of Nature blend with more exquisite harmony than in those which are set in every chapter of "Adam Bede." Still life—the harvest-field, the polished kitchens, the dairies with a concentrated cool smell of all that is nourishing and sweet, the green, the porches that have vines about them and are pleasant late in the afternoon, and deep woods thrilling with birds—all these were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the people and their cruel proceedings, I had no doubt but that we had fallen on one of the Feejee islands; and, from their well-known character, I knew what our fate would probably be. I myself had little, it might seem, to live for; but still life is dear to all of us, and I considered what I could do to preserve mine. I knew that most savages, as well as eastern nations, look upon a person deprived of his intellect as sacred, so I at once resolved to act the madman. On this, summoning all my strength, I gave vent to the loudest ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... which excited 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 ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger |
