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Lot Essay
Dated by Martine Brunner Bulst to 1632, this important work offers a vivid demonstration of the technical brilliance Pieter Claesz had achieved by the early 1630’s. These years represent a career highpoint for the artist, a period in which his works, as Brunner Bulst (op. cit.) has explained, attained a new-found sense of harmony and balance, founded on his mastery of composition and lighting effects.
Claesz only settled in Haarlem in his early twenties after emigrating from Antwerp. At the time Haarlem was enjoying a period of great prosperity and economic growth after the Twelve Years Truce of 1609-21 with a rapidly expanding mercantile class. Most of the monied merchants were of Flemish descent, forming an intellectual elite that exerted a strong influence on the city’s cultural development. As Pieter Biesboer has remarked: ‘in Haarlem a new world awaited Pieter Claesz’ (P. Biesboer, Collections of Paintings in Haarlem, 1572–1745, Los Angeles, 2001, p. 16).
Claesz’s still lifes are quite different from the static compositions of his predecessors in Haarlem, such as Floris van Dijk (c. 1575–1651), and Floris van Schooten (1585⁄8–1656), who worked from a high viewpoint and incorporated a wide array of disparate objects, often rendered in bright color. Claesz’s paintings are instead characterized by a low viewpoint and a unifying color scheme, which by the 1630s, was usually limited to warm browns and olive greens, along with the cool grey of metallic and glass objects and the yellow of a lemon.
The present work, a modest ontbijtje (breakfast piece) adopts a lowered viewpoint that creates a feeling of intimacy, bringing the viewer closer to the objects on the table; the central pewter plate balances over the edge of the table, as if actually protruding into our space. There are fewer elements than before, all organized within a carefully constructed composition fixed on the strong diagonals created by the knife and the spout of the jug. Claesz often made use of the same objects in different paintings and, as Brunner Bulst has pointed out (loc cit.), the same jug re-appears, with the lid up, in a picture, she also dates to 1632, sold Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2018, lot 47 (£550,000).
By this stage in his career, the thirty-five year old Claesz’s technical brilliance is shown to full effect in the rendition of the different textures of the lemon, bread, fruit and the reflective surfaces of the roemer and jug. At the same time, his sophisticated understanding of light means that all these objects are unified by a tonal harmony. The widespread appeal of Claesz’s works suggests they were desirable not only on decorative grounds, but also because they conveyed a deeper meaning, usually alluding to the transience of human life or perhaps allegorizing the senses. The artist's tendency towards greater simplicity can also be seen as a reflection of a more widespread move away from ostentation towards sobriety and restraint in Dutch society in the mid-seventeenth century.
Claesz only settled in Haarlem in his early twenties after emigrating from Antwerp. At the time Haarlem was enjoying a period of great prosperity and economic growth after the Twelve Years Truce of 1609-21 with a rapidly expanding mercantile class. Most of the monied merchants were of Flemish descent, forming an intellectual elite that exerted a strong influence on the city’s cultural development. As Pieter Biesboer has remarked: ‘in Haarlem a new world awaited Pieter Claesz’ (P. Biesboer, Collections of Paintings in Haarlem, 1572–1745, Los Angeles, 2001, p. 16).
Claesz’s still lifes are quite different from the static compositions of his predecessors in Haarlem, such as Floris van Dijk (c. 1575–1651), and Floris van Schooten (1585⁄8–1656), who worked from a high viewpoint and incorporated a wide array of disparate objects, often rendered in bright color. Claesz’s paintings are instead characterized by a low viewpoint and a unifying color scheme, which by the 1630s, was usually limited to warm browns and olive greens, along with the cool grey of metallic and glass objects and the yellow of a lemon.
The present work, a modest ontbijtje (breakfast piece) adopts a lowered viewpoint that creates a feeling of intimacy, bringing the viewer closer to the objects on the table; the central pewter plate balances over the edge of the table, as if actually protruding into our space. There are fewer elements than before, all organized within a carefully constructed composition fixed on the strong diagonals created by the knife and the spout of the jug. Claesz often made use of the same objects in different paintings and, as Brunner Bulst has pointed out (loc cit.), the same jug re-appears, with the lid up, in a picture, she also dates to 1632, sold Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2018, lot 47 (£550,000).
By this stage in his career, the thirty-five year old Claesz’s technical brilliance is shown to full effect in the rendition of the different textures of the lemon, bread, fruit and the reflective surfaces of the roemer and jug. At the same time, his sophisticated understanding of light means that all these objects are unified by a tonal harmony. The widespread appeal of Claesz’s works suggests they were desirable not only on decorative grounds, but also because they conveyed a deeper meaning, usually alluding to the transience of human life or perhaps allegorizing the senses. The artist's tendency towards greater simplicity can also be seen as a reflection of a more widespread move away from ostentation towards sobriety and restraint in Dutch society in the mid-seventeenth century.