Still Life with Figurine (C.128) opens Roy Lichtenstein's Six Still Lifes series with an arrangement that immediately complicates the genre it inhabits. A green figurine stands among the objects on the yellow ground — a jug, a plate, a string of pearls, bamboo stalks, a large tropical leaf — and its presence shifts the register of everything around it. Where the other objects are domestic and functional, the figurine is already a representation, a small sculpted human form placed within a print about depicted objects, introducing a second order of depiction into a genre that had always been preoccupied with the nature of representation itself.

The Dutch masters had understood this preoccupation and worked it deliberately — including sculptures, casts, and prints within their still life arrangements to fold questions about artistic representation into the surface of images ostensibly about flowers and pewter. Lichtenstein's figurine participates in that tradition while pulling it through his own style: the green form rendered with the same bold outline and unmodulated colour as the jug beside it, the hierarchical distinction between a sculpted figure and a ceramic vessel dissolved by the evenness of the treatment.

By 1974, when the Six Still Lifes were produced, Lichtenstein had been moving systematically through the genres of Western painting.. The still life was the genre that underpinned all of them, the oldest sustained vehicle for painterly self-examination in the Western tradition. Still Life with Figurine (C.128) enters it at its most self-conscious point — an arrangement that asks, through the presence of one small sculpted figure among ordinary objects, what it means to make a picture of a thing that is already a picture of something else.

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