A still life with a gilt rock crystal dish, a pewter jug, a silver ewer, a watch and a glass on a draped tablecloth

Highly acclaimed in his lifetime, Willem Kalf brought the still-life genre to new heights with his sumptuous pronkstilleven. In the 1650s, Kalf distilled his compositions to small groups of precious objects carefully arranged on richly patterned textiles against a dark background. These elegant arrangements were heralded for their luminosity and verisimilitude, prompting comparisons to Vermeer.

The present still life relates closely to a painting in the Schlossmuseum, Weimar (inv. no. G 169), but varies with the inclusion of the roses at right and the jug in the background. Kalf frequently used the same objects and compositional devices with slight variations in his works to allow a different viewpoint or highlight to shine through. Dr Fred G. Meijer, to whom we are grateful, has proposed that the present work may be a slightly later, autograph variant of the Weimar painting. The painting once belonged to Friedrich Frey-Fürst, a Swiss businessman and hotelier who rehabilitated the Bürgenstock resorts in the early 1920s.