Still Life

What the painting depicts

breakfast, table, plate, fish as food, Clupea harengus, wafer glass, beer, flagon.

From the museum

Around 1600, as the Dutch economy boomed, large-scale still lifes depicting luxury goods emerged as a genre that appealed to a sophisticated clientele. Pieter Claesz. was a leading painter of a type of still life often described as a “banquet piece,” which featured sumptuous foods and opulent serving vessels, typically strewn across an elaborately dressed tabletop. These costly goods—like the lemon, olives, sweetmeats, and lace-edged damask tablecloth in this painting—were sometimes depicted in a state of decay to suggest the transitory nature of coveted earthly things. The well-preserved items here instead celebrate wealth and its lavish display.

Simeon B. Williams Fund

Materials & technique

Materials: oil paint, canvas.

Technique: panel painting, oil painting, painting, painting (image making), painting techniques.

Inscriptions: Inscribed in ligature: PC (on knife blade).

Provenance

Probably Cassirer, Amsterdam [the mounts of photos in both the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, and the Witt Library, London, are marked Cassirer, Amsterdam, 1939, though the picture was at the Art Institute from late 1935; the Witt photo is also annotated “Worcester, Mass.”; see also Vroom 1945 and Bergstrom 1956]. M. Knoedler & Co., New York by 1935 [receipt dated September 9, 1935 in Registrar’s office; the number A 1559 printed on a label on the back may be the Knoedler’s stock number]; sold to the Art Institute, 1935.

Where to see Still Life

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. View on the museum’s official page.

See more works at Art Institute of Chicago or browse the full Pieter Claesz collection.