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Lot Essay
This little-known painting which has emerged on the market for the first time in more than half a century is a characteristic example from the artist’s early maturity. While Heda had previously built up his compositions with a limited number of objects generally disposed further toward the background, by the mid-1630s he began to include a greater range of elements with more complexity in their spatial arrangement. Paintings of this period, including the Still life with a gilt beer can from the same year in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. no. SK-A-137), often employ a fallen tazza, which not only links the horizontal and vertical axes of the composition but its fore- and background elements. The tazza appears to be the same in both paintings, only viewed from a more elevated angle and rotated somewhat clockwise in the present painting. When compared with his more staid paintings before the late 1620s, the addition of green or white tablecloths in works such as this adds a degree of costly refinement.
Heda’s meticulous arrangement increases the sense of depth within the composition, including the projecting knife handle and the partially peeled lemon rind that dangles tantalizingly over the rim of the pewter plate, the edge of which extends over the front of the table. As is typical of Heda’s work of this period, the artist has experimented by overlaying objects onto one another, thereby imbuing his composition with greater harmony and complexity. The artist’s demonstration of virtuosity is equally evident in his ability to accurately capture reflections: the roemer not only depicts the cross-bar of the window reflected from beyond the pictorial space but the fragmented light reflected off the underside of the overturned tazza.
Despite the limited range of his visual vocabulary, Heda succeeded in creating pictures with a unique compositional arrangement each time, never repeating himself. The success of Heda’s basic compositional schema in this painting is evidenced in a somewhat larger work of nearly a decade later that was on the London art market in recent decades (fig. 1). As with the present work, a sense of elevation is created by the upright roemer at left – and, indeed, the addition of a fluted glass – in the painting of 1643, while the principal elements at centre are repeated with only minimal alterations.
Heda’s meticulous arrangement increases the sense of depth within the composition, including the projecting knife handle and the partially peeled lemon rind that dangles tantalizingly over the rim of the pewter plate, the edge of which extends over the front of the table. As is typical of Heda’s work of this period, the artist has experimented by overlaying objects onto one another, thereby imbuing his composition with greater harmony and complexity. The artist’s demonstration of virtuosity is equally evident in his ability to accurately capture reflections: the roemer not only depicts the cross-bar of the window reflected from beyond the pictorial space but the fragmented light reflected off the underside of the overturned tazza.
Despite the limited range of his visual vocabulary, Heda succeeded in creating pictures with a unique compositional arrangement each time, never repeating himself. The success of Heda’s basic compositional schema in this painting is evidenced in a somewhat larger work of nearly a decade later that was on the London art market in recent decades (fig. 1). As with the present work, a sense of elevation is created by the upright roemer at left – and, indeed, the addition of a fluted glass – in the painting of 1643, while the principal elements at centre are repeated with only minimal alterations.