The humility of the genre is precisely why I like it. The drama of a history painting, for all its sophistication, is removed from our daily lived experience. In many ways that is the point of it. Currently I am much more interested in pictures which find meaning, beauty, and poetry in the everyday.
There are numerous masters of the genre to be found in great museums: Claesz, Chardin, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne etc. But I want to focus on contemporary painters in this post. Below are a handful of still lifes by contemporary painters which I love.