Food for Thought: Pieter Claesz. and Dutch Still Life

you I am really happy and grateful to be back in this room with this audience these two lectures in the series are about still life which was something the 17th century painters of Flanders and Holland excelled at they painted and sold them in great qualities quantities in Holland they exported them to well-to-do collectors all over Europe still lives were high in popularity despite the fact that they were actually low in prestige in the opinion of writers on art during the entire century still life ranked at the bottom of the various categories of art at the top were history paintings pictures of important events in history or scripture or myth they were seen as more challenging intellectually and harder to do you had to represent human bodies and expressions that had to be studied from the living model at the beginning of the century Carol faun Munder wrote that still-life painters were the foot soldiers in the army of artists nevertheless writers did admire the best still-life painters for their skill at mimicking the look of their subjects so vividly still life flourished in the real world of making and selling as one recent writer put it still life thrived in a theoretical vacuum the pictures were fascinating to look at and at times an absolute wonder even beyond their uncanny realistic surfaces these pictures have an ingenious structure and a play with form revealed by light that artists in later centuries have always understood without consulting treatises this large a painting by de Haim in the Louvre for instance was a starting point for arie Matisse who studied its structure and made his own large version of it changing its colors reorganizing it and flattening it Dutch and Flemish painters believed that their still lives like history paintings could convey ideas that they could convey truths and their customers did too still lifes were often what I've called in my title food for thought they weren't just for looking at they were for thinking about and meditating upon in 1614 the writer rumor ficer wrote in a book of emblems there is nothing empty or useless in things he meant that you could look at it ordinary things around you and with a little imagination they could lead you to some truth about life or some cliche about good behavior or bad about material desires and the possible danger they pose opposed for the soul so for example if you observe a mother combing her child's hair to remove lice you might think that that ordinary daily act Ordinariate for the 17th century anyway that was performed by dutiful mothers and you might see it as a symbol see it as virtuous the way rumor Fisher did he offered the comb as a symbol a sign that purification itself is an ornament for a woman perhaps the only ornament she really needs still life painting was often intended not just to be pleasing but to instruct to give people something edifying to ponder it's hard for us today to imagine just how strong this taste for moralizing was that to quote one writer the Dutch had an relentless addiction to taking everyday things and Agers either searching out there and here in inner meanings perhaps extracting a moral lesson or conversely using them as vehicles to be loaded with ready-made ideas this way of thinking about paintings is going to come up more than once in these lectures when we say still life we're using a term that was coined by the Dutch themselves still leyva meaning pictures of things that are either incapable of movement or that lack of soul the range of things that painters depicted got steadily wider and by the middle of the 17th century it included many categories including Vanitas images like this one about the brevity of life so called breakfast pieces with food and lots of it kitchen still lives with implements and vessels and food pipe-smoking pieces with the necessary apparatus arrangements of plane or very fancy wares and food fruit pieces compositions of dead game and weapons and sorry pictures of dead fish it was also a large category of flour still alive so large that I'm gonna deal with it in a separate lecture each of these categories has subcategories and each had specialists so that in many cases artists could make a living painting just a single type same kind of specialization by the way that's true of the varieties of landscape and these lectures you're gonna hear me using the words Dutch and Flemish by Dutch I'm referring to the people living in the northern Netherlands here that had been ingeniously fitted into a map of the 17th century in the shape of their mascot a lion the seven provinces of the New Republic that had become independent de facto at least from their Spanish overlords in 16:9 and had built a huge and growing economy from trade with the rest of Europe and from imports from various trading stations throughout the world from finance from insurance and certain manufacturers they belong mainly to Calvinist and other Protestant sects with a strong Catholic minority by Flemish I mean people in the southern Netherlands people living down here south of the lions hindquarters this is a map made in by the Dutch ten provinces remained Spanish and mainly Catholic and they were also prosperous enough through types of Commerce like those of the breakaway provinces to their north there was a fitful war going on but during much of the time the border between the Netherlands North and South was porous they had the same language and in most ways they belong to a single cultural sphere early in the century and conditions that made them better off and free to practice their protestant religion they came to the north there was also patronage for artists in the great cities of Antwerp and Brussels in particular from the church's German still-life painters also contributed as you'll see contributed to still life in fact the earliest independent still lives we have like this one by the German Bartle bruyne carry the sobering reminder written on the page here everything passes with death death is the ultimate limit of everything that's a saying attributed to Lucretia's the Roman poet and philosopher and endlessly paraphrased in Christian sermons Catholic and Protestant ever since but this isn't a Christian motto it's a pagan one ancient literary and philosophical tested texts had been rediscovered by Italian scholars and penetrated in northern Europe by the middle of the 16th century loosening the grip of Catholic orthodoxy at the same time there were other great discoveries in particular a new approach to science based on observation and classification natural science was one of the ancestors of still life painting and some of the illustrators of animals and insects and botanical specimens this one youris hoof inaho were also Peters the upsurge of painting in the 17th century was paralleled by the collecting of things not just precious objects made by craftsmen but also and especially specimens of natural history that were evidence of the endless wonders of nature for an entire century European seafarers had been exploring Asia and Africa in the new world and bringing back amazing new material year after year this was the great age in fact of what the Germans called the kunst went wunderkammer the Cabret cabinet of curiosities scholars and artists worked for princes and highborn patrons all over Europe to collect and classify and show the finest and most curious specimens if you look around the private Museum here of Ferrante Imperato and Naples pictured in his enormous Lea influential book of $15.99 he was a geologist so there are minerals and ores and curious formations in these cabinets but the emphasis emphasis in this room is on birds and sea creatures as you see on the ceiling some tips for interior decoration from people who are running out of space before we return to still life in the Netherlands I want to make a short side trip to Italy into Spain where still-life was a minor specialty but occasionally so brilliant and influential you can't pass it by even a lecture on Dutch painting about the time that yours who've Naju was drawing those insects and fruit on a tiny scale this painter from Cremona vincenzo compy was spreading it all out life-sized fruit of all kinds offered for sale by a good-looking market girl with a skirt full of peaches this is about abundance and also about the marvellous variety of grapes and figs and cherries and other fruits that had been cultivated by clever humans not merely gathered wild this is a picture this looks in two directions it looks back to its inspiration these market scenes by Flemish painters a generation earlier on the top the of claustrophobic in your face of butcher stalls of Peter aartsen and below that the untidy displays of fruit and vegetables by your Humberto lar and P looks forward to Caravaggio it was piece still lifes that evidently suggested to the young painter Chicano Maggio that he might paint a basket of fruit all by itself not on a table but on a ledge at our eye level against a modern model a plaster wall the fruits and the leaves have blemishes and insect holes they're an idealized there is an idealized as Caravaggio's actors in his scene of Christ revealing himself at Emmaus where as you can see he puts another basket of fruit on the table upstaging the action and doing it with an audacious bit of trickery making it seem to hang out over the edge into what looks like our space and that sharpens our sense of actually being present at the scene now Caravaggio didn't set off a wave of still life painting in Italy but his example spread and spread to Spain as well where older artists like this one had been practicing an indigenous brand of still life perfect fruits and vegetables symmetrically displayed against the dark background this is all literal and prosaic to our eyes quaint almost folk like the remarkable thing is that just at the same time this painting was created a composition so stunning and its simplicity and so believable in each of the five fruits and vegetables that we wonder if this was really maybe how things were hung up and laid out in Spanish kitchens but then we shake that off and we see it as complete artifice contrived to make this quart of improbable extremely graceful cascade of forms through space this artist also Spanish places delicate glass and ceramic forms across the surface in a simple but calculated rhythm alternating light and dark hardly even suggesting the space around and this artist in turn made it possible in the 1630s for zoomerang to give ordinary subjects a quality of monumentality and a very subtle richness of surface and color there's something about this display for many people that has a kind of numinous character as though these things were meant as gifts from God it reminds you of what st. Teresa of Avila said to herself that she never entered a kitchen without as she said thinking that the Lord is walking among the pots and pans when we compare a very fine simple Dutch still life at the same time to Zorba Ron we see a big difference it has luminous envelope of space a complex composition and a suggestion that people have already been here the Spanish do without these complications and put across something that is perfectly wonderful but in a different way now I'm back to Northern Europe where we left off painted still lives began with this ancient theme as you heard of the brevity of human life and the foolish must foolishness of our attachment to material things and sense pleasures this is an idea that had a long life in the Netherlands and on the right is the first picture of its kind from the beginning of the century by the brilliant Dutch painter jakob de panne he invents a symbolic language beginning with the oldest symbol of all at scull and adds a flower symbol of beauty and transients in this case it's a tulip of that gorgeous striped kind that was being developed right then in the Leiden Botanical Garden flanking the tulip is another vase with a bit of smoke coming out of it well these are both old testament images as many members of the audience would know right away not this audience but the audience that the picture was painted for sorry in the book of Job man comes forth like a flower and is cut down and also my days are consumed like smoke above the skull is a bubble another short-lived object of beauty and flanking the niche are fictive sculptures here of Heraclitus and Democritus the weeping and laughing philosophers of antiquity the skull rests on some wisps of dry grass which recall the prophet Isaiah all flesh is grass all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field the grass withereth the flower fadeth because the Spirit of the Lord blows upon it and on the sill there are coins of the Habsburg Empire which the Dutch were in the process of defeating should anybody miss the moral of all this carved into the top of the arch are the words who mana vana right duty pleasure riches worldly power all of them come to an end I'm here I'm going to introduce the artist of my title today Peter class who took up this theme but didn't take up defines diagrammatic way of treating it instead we have instead of this nish I should say we have a table and the skull sits on a book and papers bridged by a feather quill a swooping down to an ink holder it's a kind of process and product there's a wineglass tipped over someone's been here drinking and writing but it's all finished the wine of life is gone in the oil lamp the flame of life has guttered out what strikes us is how plausible this all looks how persuasive the glass seems with those reflections of the windows of the room that we're in and the shine of light on the red glaze of the earthenware lamp and the crackle a texture of the paper we also see how subtle the shadows are everywhere we look we see a dance of diagonals in two directions here here here and we see the skull turned off center now what looked like a simple setup at first is actually barely in balance starting with the glass you wonder what keeps it there it could roll off with the least movement just as the quill could fall with a breath of air I think with this arrangement the painter is suggesting that life is not only short but precarious as well this kind of still life appears in many hundreds of inventories in Holland in the 17th century under the title Vanitas I'm Peter Klaus made elaborate variations on the theme the set up here has some of the same stuff as the picture we just saw plus a violin whose sounds after all are heard for only a brief moment and then fade like life itself there's a pocket watch down there too a pretty new invention that appears in many still lifes through the centuries counting out the hours the novelty here is the glass ball stand-in for the soap bubble that you saw in the painting by decaying a moment ago it reflects the still life on the table you can see the violin and other things it reflects the still light on the table and the room beyond with its door and window and the artist himself at the easel painting the very picture we're looking at so the painter is showing off here demonstrating that his mind is nimble enough to employ two systems of describing the world at once conventional one point perspective for the table and spherical wide-angle projection in the globe he lets the spectator comprehend more of the world around him than she could with the painters help well this is a trick Klaus doesn't perform again he turns from this kind of hermetic and self referential world and becomes a virtuoso of consumption he paints tables that appear ready for us the viewers to what exactly not sit down because there are no chairs or even space for chairs let alone plates for us well is it a buffet if so people have been there already they've been at it it's a bit of a mess the pies been broken into bits are scattered around all hours have escaped the dish and are on the tablecloth no this is a display of good things for us to look at arranged with no functional order but with a lot going on visually there are shapes and colors and textures with terrific variety organized symmetrically they're basic shapes of course are ovals which you can see everywhere there's a vertical centerline and here and to the left of that a candy plate over here to the right the bread to the left of it again the olives and whoops where's my Tinkerbell there the olives then to the right another plate and so forth a serving spoon to the left and to the knife to the right not incidentally diagonals that converge making a big triangle so formally the picture is tightly thought through we get a very good view of this layout on the table because our point of view is rather high we're looking down at the table and I think certain things are there just to intrigue you the plate that sticks out and beyond the edge of the table kind of slightly unnerving and that's the artist show off his skill and there's the lemon which in still lives all through the century often steals the show most often the lemon has been partly peeled by somebody with the skill to make the peel form a kind of continuous helix the peeled lemon in fact becomes a kind of kind of compulsory figure in competition among like still live painters for grace and precision the nubbly top has already sliced so we can savor the look of the translucent lemon flesh with the pewter actually visible through it and see lemons reflection in the surface the more you look the more you see well if this is food for thought what did the artist want us audience to think about indulgence and its dangers that's been suggested and some people might indeed a thought that way I imagine that ideas about order and disorder might arise but the likeliest train of thought I think is that this food won't last long the pie and the bread and the olives and the lemon will be eaten for be given to servants or be thrown out to decompose they'll be gone but not the painting the painting will survive and it'll go on teasing and amazing people long after the food and the people who ate it are gone so I think the painting embodies among other things an ancient adage educated Dutch people knew from a treatise by the physician Hippocrates it goes life is short art is long this is one of the truths that painters of food and flowers still lives invite us to consider again and again and again well there's another maximum you might expect to apply here the famous advice of Horace carpe diem seize the day pluck fruit while it's ripe and trust till tomorrow that's actually not a sentiment that was repeated by the Dutch although they knew it very well their Christian beliefs favored restraining yourself today in the expectation of a reward tomorrow PETA class didn't invent this kind of still life we've been looking at with food and drink on the table he inherited it and he made it more complex and subtle this is work by osseous beard and Antwerp painter the previous generation who sold a lot of pictures in the northern Netherlands and abroad here the delicate wine glasses in the background and the silver tots ah with expensive fancy baked goods tell us that we're a rung or two up the socio-economic ladder from Peter class somebody's nibbled at the candy here and left traces but everything otherwise everything seems to be pretty much in order and ready for inspection now you may think a little too much in order a beard here is playing a game of ovals he may have been the one actually who invented this sort of game with form but he isn't the virtuoso at it that Peter class is the set up on the table here was a formula that other artists did use over and over again in other words a convention if we took it as a real-life meal we'd be wrong I mean as one writer has put it still lifes like this would lead us to believe that meals were eaten alone standing at the corner of a table and always beginning with the peeling of fruit Peter classes paintings are still artifice but they masquerade more convincingly as the real thing they reach a new level of subtlety look at this painting and particularly if you look up close look at this gene on the nautilus shell here for instance and look at the turkey feathers behind it which are flicked on with soft detached touches of the brush and look at the crusts of the roll down here which he makes crumbly by scattering yellow ochre highlights across the surface this is a kind of modest form of virtuosity it gives a different kind of attention though to the expensive collector's piece here which is a shell of a chambered nautilus brought from the South Pacific then put into a silver gilt mount made for it by Dutch or German Goldsmith there's also a large Chinese bowl these things speak directly about wealth and indirectly about how they got to the Netherlands a long dangerous profitable voyage to Asia that brought them over on the left class place is an exquisite pewter pitcher and a wine glass and these have soft reflections of the room each reflection complex in a different way on account of the curvature of the surfaces up in the galleries here at Yale is another of these paintings by Peter cloths with a ham in the middle with mustard over here sausages wine a basket of cheeses with butter this is what the Dutch called a breakfast piece in inventories of the period and Alta Bates you even now a Dutch breakfast still looks like lunch to us and vice versa this composition gets extra activity from the bunched up white tablecloth the game of visual balance is trickier here not just because of the huge wine glass at the left but also by the Chinese dish of butter that's balanced very precariously on top of the basket of cheeses these tricks again make it clear that the entire setup is not something we'd come across in a Dutch house at breakfast or any other time it's contrived by the artist for effect let me add something more at this point about the low standing of still life in the 17th century that prejudice against still life came along with art theories the Dutch acquired from the Italian writers of the late Renaissance for example Giorgio Vasari painting inanimate objects could never challenge an artist or his audience the way that human figures could that's what writers repeated this as truth Dutch artists painted inanimate objects anyway and people bought them writers five black font Munder and samuel van Hoek strata gave plenty of instructions to figure painters for composing and painting but they didn't give any tips at all to still live painters no do's and don'ts I mean I'm convinced though that still life painters took advice that writers intended for figure painters and applied it to their work the main objective of painting since the Renaissance was to fool the eye into accepting the painting as the illusion of accepting the illusion of reality according to hoax trottin a perfect picture is like a mirror of nature which makes things do not exist appear to do so and deceives in a permissible Pleasant and praiseworthy way so you create a version of nature and you earn praise for its naturalness and your skill and imitation Dutch writers prescribed clear strong composition which they called ordinance E or fitting together by an fuking uh or ordering sketching uh an under said about successful compositions that are like music when the different sounds of singers and players make harmony so in the art of painting many various figures do the same I think instead of that phrase various figures we swapped it for various things on a table fun manner would not protest writers tied composition the arrangement of things to the pictorial space that the art is created through perspective and color and lighting and the positioning of things that entire combination of techniques gave the painting its housing a term that evidently meant plausible form and position in space I think you can actually see how painters of still life like Peter Klaus took advice that had been aimed at figure painters and this is a biblical subject here on the right by Solomon Debray who was a member of the Harlem painters guild together with Peter Klaus it shows a scene from Genesis where Joseph have has left Israel gone to Egypt where he became very grand he became Viceroy to the Pharaoh but was estranged from his father and brothers when they came to see him Joseph graciously put aside old grievances with his family and received the family the power of Dubai's composition comes from the way he groups the figures legibly creates a believable stage space with a platform and uses light and shade and harmonious subdued colors well that is what Peter class does he's got a tip completely different purpose but similar techniques he puts his main actors that Turkey and the fruit off center forming a large mass he uses color and emphasis for variety he uses the eye-catching device of the cantilevered lemon in a plate here to emphasize the illusion of space towards us as the boy and the dog do in the foreground of Dupre's composition well I'm going to leave Peter class and return to him in a minute or so I want to introduce Clara Peters an important artist of her generation and of that of osya spirit you met both of them both of them originating in Antwerp this may actually be Clara Peters herself as serving as the model for an allegory of vanity she's dressed in very old fashioned costume for the time and she has a table full of rich thing jewels and coins and two specimens of Goldsmith's work one tipped over and beyond at a covered cup of great grapes blender she looks offstage and she holds a pocket watch time is passing life may be good now the message is but it will go the way of the flowers in the vase and it may be it's gone it may be gone as quickly as the bet that somebody placed on the roll of those dice and life is like a soap bubble there's one floating next to her head it will pop so you've seen this apparatus before in the grim looking painting by Ida Haines imagery was popular as I've said this many many versions here's a more spacious version by an Amsterdam painter jakob duke table loaded with symbols of wealth and knowledge and passing time and there's the skull again the whole repertory of folly and futility the message is exemplified by the gorgeously dressed woman who seems pleased at all this and doesn't appear to be learning the lesson one bit the most moving allegory of vanity at this period is actually an imaginary scene of repentance the picture by the great French artist george de la tour of mary magdalene the reformed sinner whose shed her fancy clothes and sits with a skull in her lap and books on the table contemplating the flame it's clear that she has learned her lesson Clara Peters again with more ingredients for still lifes during the century ahead food that is butter here on top of cheese wine bread pretzels nuts all pushed close together a bit dryly painted in subtle raking light and there could be a cautionary note sounded by this particular setup that people would have picked up at the time by the way there's a Dutch proverb that says dairy on top of dairy is the work of the devil too much of a good thing in other words is a bad thing Peter class again in a picture upstairs you can look at at your leisure the ingredients for breakfast or lunch not especially appetizing to us as breakfast maybe a herring wine beer and a pipe with tobacco but again we can't be too literal this is not a place setting or a buffet table there is a thematic relationship however between these objects and this really have to be seen up close to be believed the slides get you fairly close to the impression this makes but not close enough common line of thought would be here that everything will be consumed here including the matches here the tobacco in the tin and the coals here in the brazier gorgeously painted the coals and the brazier used to light the matches the cards are tradition in Dutch our symbol of a waste of time and an invitation to reversal of fortune like the dice in the paint picture you just saw by Clara Peters especially since the ace of spades is showing him smoking though was a relative novelty tobacco was an import from the new world that was getting popular but it was still associated with the lower orders peasants and sailors and soldiers much as marijuana does in this country until the 1950s smoking was an easy target for Calvinist preachers rumour Visser's emblem makes the point clear the killjoy motto tells the story often something new seldom something good painting at the Metropolitan Museum on the right makes kind of a joke of it that's likely to be Brower himself with a Popeye's in the middle out slumming with his well-dressed friend a still-life painter that we'll meet in a moment young Davidge to Haim what they smoked at the time was strong stuff with mild hallucinogenic properties which you might guess from the expression on several of the faces including including brower's this is by Peter class's counterpart in Harlem the villain Klaus Hado who painted many of the same subjects in a somewhat cooler tonality with finer more sharply focused technique the light falls more emphatically here on the table in the wall behind as well making a distinct space around it on the white tablecloth is not just bread and oysters but a collection of glass and metal work that's far grander than anything we've seen so far at the right you got a kind of summit meeting of huge pewter flagon and tall gilt cup silver Tulsa tipped over silver standing salt here there's a great big to handle rumor you could say an exquisite Venetian pitcher things are just a bit disordered some oysters and bread have already been eaten and a glass at the far right as capsized just as arbitrarily is the big Tata hazard we see right away with these two fallen things do they're the two sides of an implied triangle but stabilizes the right half of the picture plays off against the unstable disordered white cloth and again the plates are pushed out a bit precariously into our space a customary game of balance is going on on the right the crowding of those large vessels into a much heavier visual mass than anything else but on the left offsetting the mass is the greater breadth of the table that exerts a kind of cantilevering force to produce equilibrium and they're nice touches here like the familiar lemon pushed to the far side and trailing down and to the void pita began a decade earlier with vanity house paintings like this one which are meditations on music and learning and other activities that tempt people to self-importance to pride which may in the end be as bad for the soul as too many oysters and too much wine is for the body HIDA relies much more on subtle modulations of light and dark than on strong color in fact there isn't any strong color this so-called monochrome color scheme of Gray's and tans was common to many Dutch artists painting these subjects all kinds of subjects starting around 1625 or so and on in the mid century this began in fact with see painters especially this one on the upper left a young poor Seles it spread to landscape and came indoors for genre paintings to one generations preference for modesty is apt to be reversed by the next generation of course which is just what happened meanwhile mmm he does as modest as his colors were became one of the great observers of the play of light on materials and one of the most seductive sort of conjurer's of form about the time he painted this picture it's contemporary young the Haim was preparing to leave Holland and go back south to Antwerp where he'd come from you saw him just a moment ago the well-dressed guy with a smoking buddy Brower he painted this still life with some new and influential ideas that he surely got from artists in Antwerp and I mean especially Rubens Rubens never painted a still life but many of his older pieces have an essential energy that comes out of a big diagonal and sometimes a spiral that comes formed by many figures slashing across the composition that is actually what we see in de Hames picture different forms bound together into one big slanting form that's interrupted by various things surprising contrasts like the lemon peel here at the top and the silver cup which cuts across that descending diagonal a lobster here is also something new you could buy lobsters but they were banquet food and they may well have been food for thought about what made them so beautiful and succulent people knew that they were dark green and weedy when they were alive at the bottom of the sea it was only in death that they fulfilled their potential for being beautiful and delicious I can't prove that Dutch actually thought that but I'm gonna suggest it anyway that's what we're free to do that bold diagonal is possible because there's such a precarious and maybe kind of impossible pileup of tipped-over vessels on top of one another you could also think in human terms about this combination of beauty and instability which could only be temporary the light streams in from the right across the wall and plays dramatically against the wall giving a kind of theatrical presence - what's going on here - hey Maz you see enters the lemon peel contest and one more time here this time he drapes the peel over the mouth of the cup and just lets it dangle down to tease us well to him very soon became the greatest still-life painter of his generation by 1640 he's working on a large scale with even richer objects this one that you saw before is 8 feet wide in the Louvre it's what the Dutch have called a brung still-life pron que Pronk means ostentation you've seen most of the stuff before but in smaller quantities and simpler settings or no settings at all maybe just suggestions here the setting is abbreviated but it's obviously palatial you bear in mind that not all clients for this kind of picture actually lived in palaces large houses maybe but in most cases grandeur like this reflects the owners aspirations not his actual condition in life this is a situation like those portraits where artists in the southern Netherlands gave their successful middle-class subjects the attributes of nobility the man here for example has been given a stock attributes of the well-born and important that is a stone of pilaster here a parapet and beyond that a view of country property and over had a mighty swag of drapery but this wasn't an elevated personage it wasn't a wealthy man he was a Peter he was a still-life painter at that and you'll see his work in a minute here all that honorific apparatus frames superabundant rich vessels which are disordered in ways that we've been talking about the pie broken into by somebody who got there first it's also precarious a huge huge Chinese plate very expensive tilts sits on top of the cheese and tilts as though it were going to fall off this is evidence again that what the hane was painting was not an actual buffet but instead a complex setup in the studio by the painter who would then pull off the miracle of painting it convincingly there are a few extras thrown in like the globe's here at the right polluting have the knowledge of geography that made those foreign imports possible the loot at the left speaks of cultivation and perhaps of the harmony that reigns here by mid-century des Haim was painting banquet still lives with less prone in their setting but with rich vessels nevertheless the trick was how to impose some coherence on such a terrific variety of food fruits vegetables ham lobster which may look piled up haphazardly at first he does it by making a large wedge of form that rises from left to right placing that huge wineglass at its apex and by distributing strong accents of color red particularly and by creating a pattern of tilted ovals of a kind we've seen before these tilt and cascade down echoing one another as they go at the same time the hane became the most original painter of flower still lifes but that's a story for the next lecture nearly on a par with de Haim as a virtuoso was the painter villain from Elst he was a generation younger than two Haim and partly formed by him he spent 10 years abroad in France for four years and then in Florence as court painter to the Grand Duke of Tuscany this is an astonishing seven foot high picture of an assemblage of arms and armor and other spended metalwork that's as though he'd been commissioned by some wealthy noblemen or to paint his armor and trappings and his finest serving vessels plus chain and medallion the sign of princely favour so do we detect a sign of transience anywhere here a watch or a guttering candle maybe or some note of caution about pride and worldly success not that I can make out I haven't seen anything like this it looks like shameless ostentation to me if you look at the intense blue of the table of cover here you realise it's painted with ultramarine the pigment made from ground-up lapis lazuli brought all the way from Afghanistan the rarest and most expensive pigment of all this picture is still in the Palazzo Pitti the former grand ducal palace residence in Florence found oust sets the viewpoint lower than we've been seeing and the format is vertical so the pile of fruit is level with us and the glass covered cup towers up up up and we see it foreshortened from below it's a picture that seems to be all about ripeness the moment of perfection the melon ready to eat the fruit all each listening with droplets the peach just beginning to split the grape leaves here and the twisted tendrils perform a kind of acrobatics on top of all this these have turned blue by the way because the yellow that he'd used to mix with blue got to get green had faded something that you see in landscapes in this period to that moused is best known as a flower painter and he's also the master of another branch of still life painting and I haven't been showing you the so called game piece these pieces show dead animals and birds and sometimes the weapons that brought them down at the center here is a partridge hung upside down by his feet wings splayed out in a kind of touching sort of downward flight and two songbirds here in a Kingfisher strung up these are almost upstaged by the hunters bag made of fabulous velvet with a gold fringe and silver buckles there's no gun here but there's something hanging at the top next to the little birds that tells you what killed them it's a hood with a little plume and it would have covered the head of a falcon until it was time to let it loose this little boy shows you let it loose so that it would intercept those birds in midair at the right side you see a picture of a party of falconers letting fly as their servants on foot at the left and at the right are holding hooded Falcons for when they're needed hunting had been an aristocratic prerogative in Holland earlier in the century when few people other than Nobles had the land to for hunting as rich merchants were buying country estates and often buying the titles that went with them a game hunting became more common and there were buyers for pictures that boasted of the stags and the boars and the birds and the prowess of the hunters that had managed to bring them down or might hope to bring them down the details reveal what you see in this painting up close from else kind of phenomenal exactness at recording all of this the nice geometry here of the Falcons hood and even the knots in the strings and then there's the bag and its fastenings it's a it's quite a trick to be this precise without losing the variety in the life of the painted surface this taste for hunting and game paintings came from the southern Netherlands where it was established by Rubens and the artists in his circle especially this one from Snyder's whose portrait you saw a moment ago in this picture it's about eight feet wide Snyder's uses the broad sweep of diagonals we've been seeing in other pictures a kind of characteristic device of Flemish painters contrasting the postures and the colors here of the grey heron and the peacock which parallel each other but are very different and that adds a kind of variety as and as well as coherence the setting here it must be a kitchen or a larger but there's wine and a cooler and glasses set out so we don't take this as a realistic scene behind the scenes let's say of food preparation this is more like a celebration Rembrandt painted exactly one still life an image of dead game that once you see you've never forget he put two peacocks together with a basket of fruit on a ledge outside a window the shutter is open so that the birds can conveniently be hung on hooks here and displayed to potential buyers the girl is presumably minding the shop other painters made pictures of market sellers and their stalls but not one with this kind of drama Rembrandt of course amps it up with the light which falls behind the birds as well as on them and he paints the feathers with an energetic and forceful strokes and there's a pathos in the blight have bright blood that snakes toward us and also in the way that the heads are picked out by the light and casts and are doubled really by the shadows they cast on the cell Snyder's crossbred his game pieces with fruit and flower still lives and produced some epic lips life-sized panoramas of food and potential food servants hungry dogs and all in all the good life for people who could afford it he had the stars of the show the star of the show is this Swan here with in a graceful sort of pod to do it with the deer which is stiff with rigor mortis one of the greatest of all Dutch still lives I think is this one by a versatile painter who knew the Flemish Flemish tradition very well at the right of bittern hangs upside down it's under feathers seemed to explode in the light the wild turkey Nestle's against the Swan as though he were asleep in a kind of feather bed those feathers are painted with soft strokes that painters still call featherly feathery strokes this is one of the highest achievements of Wayne ex whose found a way of painting that suggests rather than spells out the details of what he's showing the birds are beautiful in death while they were alive and flying and sitting or even walking there was a beauty in their movements but we wouldn't have seen the graceful poses and choreographed relationships that we see here was there some moral in all this did the artist want to convey something about life and death well nobody's actually argued for that and I kind of doubt it I think this was intended to be admired admired as a feat of composing and painting another Dutch painter who reaches this height is much better known and that's villain golf who was born in Rotterdam like from Alice he spent time in France as a young artist and practiced a particular mix of peasant genre painting and still life these are small pictures of tumbledown atmospheric kitchens with simple vessels that he paints with a kind of crumbly suggestive paint surfaces and coffees really good at this he's so good that a century later his pictures with a starting point for the intimate kitchen pieces painted by the French artist Sharda which take the possibilities in Dutch still life painting still farther gulf develops what you could call this sort of upstairs vocabulary to this is something like the Pronk still lives of Haida but with more lavishly upholstered setting and with stronger light and what's striking when you look up close at this picture is how broad and patchy the highlights are they're not tiny precise touches like those of Haida and others we've seen particularly if you look at the chain you see something here in a equally amazing in the background here on the left very free the brushed roll of bread and wine glass full of broad touches their partly translucent and there's also the wine glass equally freely painted and behind it the reflections on the silver platter excuse me cough goes far beyond every other still-life painter in the way he treats the metal vessels and groups the fruit with care and restrain dignity without showing off the space around is just suggested the vessels though are fabulous an example of contemporary silver smithing probably by Adam from V Annan and at all amazing glass holder gilt a surmounted by a wine glass after a while you can make up that the whole setup is in a stone nish it's not served up for you on a table but arranged almost as though it were worthy of veneration the right is a pocket watch again with the usual reminder that time is passing and if you care to think about it so is your life so don't get attached some amazing things happen in calfs work that we haven't seen before here the light bounces up from the lemons into the silver and gilt vessels that kind of glowing a flush of yellow the effect is truthful and kind of magical at the same time you might wonder how golf managed to round up these very expensive props for his pictures like Haida and Dehaene he must have borrowed them in this case at least and probably many other cases some of them appear in more than one painting the drinking horn in this picture a buffalo horn with silver mounts was actually made a century before for an Amsterdam militia company of archers who patron saint was Saint Sebastian and we see on the base here being shot with arrows the horn was a kind of talisman for the militiamen and they used it on ritual occasion during Cobbs time it's now actually in the Historical Museum in Amsterdam it's likely that coffee made the painting in fact for a member of the militia right here coffe combines a buffalo horn with a lobster when you wonder could that have suggested anything is that more food for thought to creatures that had powerful defenses after all a hard carapace and two pointed horns both of them ending up by providing the master race with food and drink again no 17th century writer instructed us to think those thoughts but we may if we like the painting technique again is striking because the highlights are scattered like stars over the shell of the lobster and in other places like those little silver figures which stand up as detached blobs only one other painter in the Netherlands renders light in that way you see it in four mirrors paintings of around this time like the milkmaid especially in his still life on the table the materials are different cuffs are shiny premieres are crumbly but the effects produced by each man's of constellation of soft blotchy highlights are very similar and quite uncanny I'm going to end with this picture by Calv which is for me the most rewarding a still life of all it deserves a close look and a thoughtful one keeping your mind open to the associations that are aroused by what you see I think that's the spirit in which the artist wanted us to approach the painting here I'm following some suggestions made by a colleague of mine and Lowenthal there's nothing new here in the inventory of objects except maybe the red carpet carpets were used as table coverings and well-to-do houses and in fact you can still see them on tables in old-fashioned Dutch restaurants in smaller cities and there's a Dutch as a Turkish carpet in this painting upstairs by young stain a part of the furnishing of sort of pseudo respectable room used for entertaining guests and fleecing them coughs carpet is a fine Persian example this scrunched up so we can't really make out the pattern so it provides a kind of party game for connoisseurs who would have probably had enough clues from what we see here to recognize what they were looking at and might well identify where it came from on the carpet is a little anthology of objects of great great luxury there is a Chinese porcelain bowl with a lid decorated with colorful figures modeled in relief sticking into the bowl is a fine silver spoon and underneath it is a silver platter and the style of contemporary with the painting and a lemon with an unwinding peel the best there is as far as I'm concerned is they're together with a knife and an opal handle that's obviously did the job of peeling at the right is a large Seville orange from the Mediterranean just touched on its shoulder with love by light and behind the orange the familiar Dutch rumor holding white wine and not a normal a shell another in a fabulous gilt mount that all returned to in a second and a tall glass goblet with a cover and a base both fantastically ornamented with twisted glass canes all-in-all it's a kind of mini trade show imports from China Venice the Dutch islands of these Asia Persia even the tropical locales where the citrus came from a connoisseur of calfs time knew all that and would have inspected the figure on the non in the figures on the novelist mount and the ones on the porcelain bowl there from two different traditions the first pagan mythology of the sea represented by the mer man here with his twisted tail fish tail was straining to hold up the shell and the figure of the sea god neptune on the top and then there's the old testament and the story of jonah who has shown escaping from the great toothy sea creature whose belly he lived in for three days and three nights until god set him free he's running from the fish toward the tall glass containing red wine which Lowenthal suggests is an allusion to the christian wine of salvation and I think she's right on the bowl several brightly coloured visitors from yet another culture China several of the eight immortals of Taoism former humans who became something like saints I'm stressing this mix of deities and saints from different belief systems in this picture because they are food for thought and they were intended to be their reminders of the extent of the Dutch Seaborn Empire the title of the great history book by Charles Boxer the Dutch Seaborn Empire they're a boast of wealth of course and of the power and the success that brought that wealth to the Netherlands they're a demonstration of the wit of vilem Cove and of his tremendous prowess in making this divin'd like other still lives we've seen it is also an advertisement this one of the excellent taste of the 17th century owner who bought it lived with it and thought about it well speaking of prowess next week I'm going to talk about the prowess of Dutch breeders of flowers of gardeners and of the artists who painted them so please join us thank you you

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 24,348

Rating: 4.8169932 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, Pieter Claesz, Painting (Visual Art Form), Still Life (Visual Art Genre)

Id: ivzN-9V9ps4

Length: 66min 57sec (4017 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2015