John Frederick Peto (1854–1907)

Still Life of Candle, Pipe, and Books is a fine example of the artist’s work, condensed in a small format. Shades of orange and green dominate its rich palette, with accents of red and cyan and warm glazes in the shadows. Peto depicted the odds and ends of a man’s library and displayed the parts of them that emphasize their wear and age: the ripped wrapper of a tobacco canister, two burnt matches and wick of a candle, a tarnished candlestick with hardened drips of wax, the blackened rim of a clay pipe, and the worn leather binding of books. These signs of the passage of time function as a memento mori—the traditional reminder of death found in the seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes that preceded Peto’s work—but they also tell the story of a man’s life and form an abstract portrait of him.