Following to the volume published in 2010, on the occasion of the exhibition with the same title, covering the period from the 17th to the 18th century, we publish now volume two, which accompanies the second part of the show.

While the emergence of photography served as a boundary for the start of the new show covering still-life painting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the year of Calouste Gulbenkian’s death, 1955, concluded this path. The presence of works by leading painters is faced with the works by other artists that, although not having practiced mostly this genre, gave an important contribution, by exploring different methods using painting and other mediums. 

Neil Cox (University of Essex), responsible for curating the exhibition and author of all the texts in the catalogue, offers the reader, with great clarity and scholarship, the possibility to learn about the challenges involved in the making of still life as a category in modern art, in constant dialogue with the works by such leading painters as Manet, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Picasso, Dalí, Magritte or Matisse. A selected bibliography and names index complete this publication.