Still Life with Cheeses

Entry

This laid table with cheeses and other food, a so-called breakfast piece, is seen from a relatively high viewpoint. The objects are depicted in a soft light against a dark background. The artist employed a meticulous technique to achieve a convincing imitation of textures in which light and reflections play an important part. The painting is a typical and well-preserved example of the earliest phase of 17th-century Dutch still-life painting. Distinctive features of that early phase include the fairly variegated palette and the fact that there is little overlapping of the objects, partly because of the high vantage point. The type of still life with a laid table follows the example of the work of Antwerp contemporaries like Osias Beert and Clara Peeters, which was developed further in Haarlem in the early decades of the 17th century by painters like Van Dijck, Floris van Schooten, Nicolaes Gillis and the early Pieter Claesz.³

The Rijksmuseum painting is one of the largest of the dozen similar still lifes by Van Dijck, some of which bear the monogram FVD and are dated between 1610 and 1622.⁴ All show a heavily laden table on which stacked cheeses are surrounded by food, drink and various other objects. Although the paintings differ in size and details, all have several motifs in common, such as the apple peel hanging down from the table, and the pewter plate with half an apple balancing precariously on the edge. As is customary with Van Dijck, the table is covered with a pinkish red damask cloth with a floral pattern, on top of which is a white damask cloth trimmed with lace. The central panel of the white tablecloth is decorated with two birds flanking a tulip. A damask cloth with this motif in the Rijksmuseum is associated with Passchier Lammertijn of Flanders, who manufactured damask in Haarlem in this period.⁵ The lace-trimmed damask is almost identical to the one in a painting by Floris van Dijck dated 1610 in a private collection.⁶ The 1610 painting also has the same spouted jug of grey German stoneware that was probably made by Christian Knütgen of Siegburg, and the porcelain bowl (a klapmuts, which has the shape of a helmet) holding apples, and ‘carrack’ or Wan-li porcelain plates.⁷

Despite the presence of similar objects in Van Dijck’s painting of 1610, they are arranged in a more harmonious and clearer way in the Rijksmuseum composition, which should therefore be dated c. 1615.

The crumbly cut faces of the cheeses show that all three are old, well-matured varieties. The one at the bottom is recognizable as old Gouda, and the one at the top is green Edam. Many connotations were attached to cheese,⁸ but these ones are probably intended to urge moderation.⁹

Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 55.