JAN FRIS | STILL LIFE OF BREAD, PRAWNS, A PIPE AND A GLASS OF BEER ARRANGED ON A TABLE

Van Duijvendijk collection, Scheveningen;

With Castendijk, Rotterdam, 1976;

Acquired for the present collection by 1984.

N.R.A. Vroom, A Modest Message, Schiedam 1980, vol. 1, reproduced p. 163, fig. 218, vol. 2, p. 53, cat. no. 255;

J. Kelch, Holländische Malerei aus Berliner Privatbesitz, exhibition catalogue, Berlin 1984, p. 38, cat. no. 16, reproduced p. 39;

E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Holländische Stillebenmalerei im 17. Jahrhundert, Lingen 1995, vol. 2. p. 359, cat. no. 129/5, reproduced.

Nearly all of Fris' few known still life paintings comprise simple arrangements of toebackje elements such as a pipe, tobacco or spill, with a jug and glassware and sometimes shellfish, arranged on a table-top or ledge. His subject-matter, compositional types and his style, with rich brown tones predominating, are influenced by Jan van de Velde. Some of Fris' small-scale works however, including this work, and another from the same year in Tübingen, and a Toebackje from 1654 (now lost) are more simplified than those of Jan van de Velde, so that the viewer is invited to contemplate a sparse arrangement of domestic objects which are dramatically lit so as to pick them out from a neutral dark background.¹ The purging of color from these pictures acts in a similar in these works as it does in the tonal landscapes of Jan van Goyen, allowing form and texture to predominate. Here Fris has built up his composition using nuances of tone and modulations of light, endowing the objects depicted with a solidity of form and a definition of texture—the fleshiness of the soft inside of the briken bread roll and the luminous hardness of the bone handle of the knife for example—without the competing distraction of color. 

1. See Vroom, 1980, vol. 2, p. 53, no. 254, reproduced, & p. 52, no. 150, reproduced vol. 1, p. 161, fig. 215.