A Banquet Still Life

Artist: Floris Van Dijck (Dutch, c. 1575 - 1651)

Original Dimensions: 40 1/8" x 52 5/8"

Location: National Gallery of Art, London

About Artwork: (1622) "It was in Haarlem that many of the genres for which Dutch painting is best known were first developed. Floris van Dijck was among the city’s most important pioneers in the field of still-life painting. Celebrated for their precise realism, his paintings invariably depict banquet tables laden with bread, cheese, fruits, and luxurious glassware. On the one hand these reveal pride in how the fledgling Dutch Republic prospered, but on the other they serve as a reminder that material goods are ultimately less important than spiritual concerns, a message that would remain central to much of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting. The breakfast still life shows a richly laid table with fruit, olives, sweets and butter shavings in various blue and white Wan-Li Chinese export porcelain bowls, a stack of cheese and apples on pewter plates, a knife, a leather gourd, a stoneware Schnabelkanne, a silver-gilt nautilus cup, a roemer, stemmed glass flutes, a pewter plate with spices and a slice of melon, and various scattered fruits, breads and nuts, all arranged upon a white lace and damask cloth laid over a red damask cloth covering a table. It is largest work by Van Dijck to have survived and, within his small oeuvre, ranks as among his most impressive. Moreover, it is a superb example of the beginnings of the great Dutch tradition of painting so-called banquet still lifes. Such early examples are characterised by a predilection for delicacies laid out on a table, piled high and seen as if from a bird’s-eye view, allowing all the goods on display to be clearly visible, in much the same way as early flower still lifes of the same period tend to show every flower individually." - (National Gallery of Art, London)