Willem Claesz. Heda

Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Christie’s, 7 July 1978, lot 216, for £40,000, where presumably acquired by Jean Schuybroek.

While many of Heda's still lifes from the 1640s and beyond become elaborate and even grandiose, in others, such as this one and a similar small-scale composition in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, he retains the informal simplicity of his early works.¹ A work close to the Schuybroek one, with the same arrangement of large roemer, overturned tazza and half-peeled lemons was sold in Boston, Skinner, 7 September 2012, lot 300 (for $590,000). If the dating on the Skinner picture of 1630 is correct, Heda's consistent resort to very similar simple compositions lasted for twenty years or more.

Vroom's 'Modest Message' (see note 1) has more to do with the simplicity of the compositions and their very muted, almost monochrome palette, so that reflected and refracted light, and not colour, define them – as opposed to any modesty inherent in the subject-matter; among other expensive objects, the silver tazzas in the present work, and in the Rijksmuseum and Skinner pictures, were – and still are – lavish works of art.

¹ Oil on panel, signed and dated 1642, 58.5 x 67.5 cm.; see N.R.A. Vroom, A Modest Message as intimated by the painters of the ‘Monochrome Banketje’, Schiedam 1980, vol. I, p. 74, reproduced fig. 91, vol. II, p. 75, no. 367.