Michael

While I am crazy about Chardin and other French still life painters, I have also come to adore wild-and-crazy Flemish still lives with dramatic backgrounds and live animal (peacocks, dogs, etc.) studies. Some of them have amazing passages of drawing and very intriguing cool/warm color schemes.

Not that it is of any significance, but I sometimes think the painters of the first half of the 17th century (Rubens, Van Dyke, Jordaens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Halls, Caravaggio, et al) were so accomplished that it explains the relatively less vigorous state of painting in the 18th century--until Romanticism reinvented painting, it was suffering from a "been there, done that" mentality.

Cheers,

Friedrich