Lot 47
  • 47

PIETER CLAESZ. | Still life with a 'Jan Steen' jug, a peeled lemon on a pewter plate, bread, a knife, olives on a pewter plate, grapes, a glass and nuts, all on a table partly draped with a white cloth

Estimate
150,000 - 200,000 GBP
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Description

  • Still life with a 'Jan Steen' jug, a peeled lemon on a pewter plate, bread, a knife, olives on a pewter plate, grapes, a glass and nuts, all on a table partly draped with a white cloth
  • signed in monogram, lower right, on the knife: PC
  • oil on oak panel
  • 41 x 61cm

Provenance

Joseph Morpurgo, Amsterdam, by the 1940s; Thence by inheritance to the present owner.

Exhibited

Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, and Zürich, Kunsthaus (not exhibited in Washington), Pieter Claesz.: Master of Haarlem Still life, 27 November 2004 – 4 April 2005 and 22 April – 22 August 2005, no. 25.  

Literature

M. Brunner-Bulst, Pieter Claesz., Lingen 2004, pp. 172, 235, cat. no. 54, reproduced in colour p. 53; P. Biesboer et al., Pieter Claesz.: Master of Haarlem Still life, exh. cat., Zurich 2005, pp. 48, 103, 122, cat. no. 25, reproduced in colour p. 64. 

Condition

The panel is formed of a single, flat, uncradled plank. The paint surface is relatively clean and the varnish is slightly discoloured. The paint surface and impasto brushwork in the lemon peel and walnut, and in the reflections on the jug and glass are extremely well preserved. There are some tiny paint losses in the very lower left corner along the edge of the painting. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals a rather thick varnish underneath which there are retouchings to two very small patches of in the table lower left, a fine vertical line in the jug measuring 7 cm., a tiny area measuring less than 0.5 cm. squared in the background by the vine tendril centre right, and a fine horizontal line upper right 4 cm. long. The painting is otherwise untouched and in very good overall condition. Offered in a plain, stained wood Dutch style frame in very good condition.
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Catalogue Note

Pieter Claesz was around 35 years old when he painted this still life of lemons, bread, cracked nuts and olives, before a Jan Steen jug and a cutting from a vine. Claesz’s works of the 1630s are his finest semi-monochrome still lifes that demonstrate the painter’s tendency towards a ‘tonal’ palette popular among his contemporary landscape painters such as Pieter Molyn, Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael. The lemon yellow of the fruit, reflected in the polished sheen of the jug, on the rim of the pewter plate, in the highlights of the vine leaves, in the wine, and in the shells of the open walnuts, brings a unifying warm tone repeated at melodic intervals throughout the composition which is otherwise executed in an almost entirely monochromatic palette. All the technical skill that he had attained since his first dated works of 1621 is demonstrated in this modest ‘breakfast piece’ (ontbijtje).

Claesz’s still lifes are quite different from the ‘additive’ composition of his predecessors in Haarlem, such as Nicolaes Gillis, Floris van Dijk and Floris van Schooten, who took a higher viewpoint and incorporated a wide variety of colours and objects, often with geometric precision. Claesz’s paintings are instead characterised by a low viewpoint and a unifying and tonal colour scheme, which in the 1630s was usually limited to warm browns and olive greens, interspersed with the cool grey of his chosen metallic object(s) and the yellow of a lemon. His still lifes are not simply decorative depictions of a collection of random objects, but are intended to convey a deeper meaning, usually alluding to the transience of human life or perhaps allegorising the five senses. The artist's tendency towards greater simplicity of composition could well have been borne of a more widespread move away from ostentation and towards sobriety and restraint in Dutch society, in tandem with political and religious tendencies in the Netherlands during the mid-seventeenth century.

Martine Brunner-Bulst dates the present work to 1632. She writes in her 2004 monograph on the artist (see Literature) that Claesz’s works of the early 1630s demonstrate a sense of balance and harmony through the artist’s mastery in representing a high level of detail while retaining a clarity of composition and a balance of lighting effects.

1632 was also the year in which Claesz’s notable rival Willem Claesz Heda first appropriated motifs from Claesz for his own breakfast piece; he continued to borrow ideas from Claesz throughout the 1630s and '40s. Heda too was reaching his artistic maturity in the early 1630s, and while we have scant documentary evidence of their relationship, they are assumed to have known each other and each other’s work very well, and so began the founding of the distinguished tradition of still-life painting in Haarlem established by the two men.

A painting, also on panel but of slightly larger dimensions (56 x 72 cm.), that bears much in common with the composition of this ontbijtje is recorded as last having been sold Berlin, Lepke, 24 April 1909, lot 73.1 The main differences between the two pictures is the Lepke painting's inclusion of a partially eaten pie in the centre, and the replacing of the lemon with two peaches.

1 RKD Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis online reference number: 185198.