Jan Davidsz. de Heem and the invention of the pronkstilleven

Around 1635, the painter Jan Davidsz. de Heem packed his bags and headed to Antwerp. The city was only around 85 miles from his home town of Leiden — a couple of days’ travel by boat or horse — but the move caused a seismic shift in his work.

The young artist had spent his twenties painting small, dark, sparse still lifes, often of books, plus the occasional globe or human skull, mostly for a clientele from the local Protestant university.

But in Antwerp, a Counter-Reformation stronghold, de Heem was witness to the full force of Flemish Baroque — in particular, the high-drama work of Peter Paul Rubens, who by then was nearly 60 and running a large and successful studio.

De Heem’s work expanded in size and style. Between 1640 and 1643, he unveiled a series of four huge, sumptuous still lifes that embraced colour, light and meticulous detail to depict a cornucopia of fine foods, exquisite fabrics and luxurious objects from around the world: blue-and-white porcelain from China, glassware from Venice, pepper from India, tobacco from the West Indies and sea-snail shells from the Indian and Pacific oceans.

These large and elaborate compositions spawned a style of picture labelled in the 20th century as pronkstilleven — or ‘show-off’ still lifes — and de Heem cemented a reputation for being the master of the art.

Pronkstilleven paintings flaunted the worldly riches of their owners, and testified to the rise of the Dutch Republic as the most powerful mercantile nation in 17th-century Europe.

The works also used various motifs as metaphors for the five senses, the four elements and the Eucharist. At the same time, they were vanitas pictures, with snuffed-out candles and rotten fruit serving as reminders of the ephemeral nature of life.

De Heem’s series began with Fruits et riche vaisselle sur une table, dit autrefois Un dessert (1640), which later passed from the collection of Louis XVI to the Louvre. The second, The meal in jeopardy. Still life with black servant and parrot (1641) — which, at 2.6 metres wide, is the largest — is now in the Brussels City Museum. The third, A lavish banquet still life, flanked by columns, before a landscape (1642), sold at Christie’s in 1988 for $6.6 million, shattering the record for the most expensive Old Master painting auctioned in America (which had been set at $2.9 million just 24 hours before, by another de Heem still life). The fourth, A banquet still life (c. 1643), had been with the same family for more than 200 years before it was offered at Christie’s in 2020. It sold for £5.7 million (around $7.7 million) — a world record for the artist that still stands today.

The quartet were united for the first time in 2024 — each having left the artist’s studio upon completion — for the exhibition Picturing Excess: Jan Davidsz de Heem at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. MA-XRF scanning in the museum’s laboratory revealed that de Heem used incredibly expensive pigments, such as ultramarine, to enhance the paintings’ general extravagance.

Fittingly, de Heem’s pronkstilleven made him the most expensive still-life painter of the Dutch Golden Age. They also inspired a host of imitators and followers, including Andries Benedetti and Andries de Coninck. Yet, fascinatingly, he never attempted anything on such a scale again. Instead, he shifted his focus to smaller flower paintings: swags, garlands and vases of elegant peonies, roses, tulips and marigolds against dark backdrops.

He did, however, reprise the theme on a smaller scale on several occasions, possibly at the behest of influential clients. One of his finest versions, A pronk still life with luxurious objects and exotic fruits, was completed in 1649 will be offered in the Old Masters Evening Sale at Christie’s in London on 1 July 2025. Measuring just over a metre wide, and described in Fred G. Meijer’s recent catalogue raisonné as the artist’s ‘core work’ of that year, the picture reveals, from behind a drawn-back, dark-red tasselled curtain, a table laid with a cut-open fruit pie, a bread roll, an oyster, a peeled lemon, oranges, cherries, plums, peaches, apricots and black grapes. There are also pewter plates, an upturned spoon and a Wanli porcelain dish, which contains crayfish and shrimps.

On the right is a bottle casket with a silver tazza on top. Next to it is a silver ewer with a spout in the form of a goose ridden by a putto, a neck in the shape of a bearded man’s head and a handle consisting of two satyrs. To the left is a tall wine glass and a silver-gilt cup-and-cover. In the middle is a rummer of white wine.

Look closer, though, and — thanks to its immaculate condition — the work reveals even more of de Heem’s ingenuity. A single spoilt grape hints at the fragility of life. Caterpillars traverse tiny holes in the leaves in preparation for their metamorphosis. And in the bulbous glass of the wine beaker, the reflection of the artist’s leaded studio windows can be made out, with the spire of Antwerp’s cathedral just visible beyond.

Some art historians have even suggested that the central cartouche of the gilt cup shows the reverse of a canvas on an easel, while the glass body of the ewer reflects the artist himself, illuminated by a candle and surrounded by books.

Having such an array of objects packed into such a tight pictorial space enabled de Heem to display the full range of his capabilities, from the delicate transparency of glass to the bloom of grapes, the fuzz of a peach and the nubbly rind of a peeled lemon. The work operated as a calling card of sorts.

The painting is likely first documented in 1722, as part of the posthumous sale of the leading Rotterdam collector and art dealer Jacques Meijers, which also included pictures attributed to Caravaggio, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Poussin, Gerrit Dou, Van Dyck and Rubens.

After selling for 225 guilders to the Davenport family, owners of Davenport House in Shropshire, it subsequently appeared at Christie’s in 1931, this time fetching 740 guineas. It went on extended loan to the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio, then passed through three more private collections in New York, London and Germany. The last time it was seen in public was when it sold again at Christie’s, fetching £1.6 million in 1997.

As for the popularity of pronkstilleven, it peaked in the 1660s, then began to wane as the Dutch Republic’s power diminished and the works’ message of plenty no longer rang true. De Heem’s influence, however, did endure, inspiring both Cezanne and Matisse to reinvent the still-life genre at the turn of the 20th century.

The 1 July 2025 Old Masters Evening Sale will be on view from 26 June to 1 July as part of Christie’s Classic Week season in London