A still life with a roemer, a crab and a peeled lemon

WALL LABEL: A still life with a roemer, a crab and a peeled lemon, 1643

The still life genre became extremely popular in the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Paintings of inanimate objects by Dutch artists included animals, fruit and flowers, and were described at the time by the Latin terms inanimatus and vanitas. Pieter Claesz was praised for his vanitas  paintings, which depicted, as seen here, a wide variety of objects associated with Dutch supremacy in trade. A recent study has estimated that over a quarter of a million such paintings were made for a market supported by a population of a mere four million.

Tansy Curtin, Curator of International Art Pre-1980

Pieter Claesz. was born in Berchem, near Antwerp in Flanders. He likely trained in Antwerp before moving north, c.1621, to the Dutch Republic township of Haarlem, which had become a popular destination for entrepreneurs, merchants, artists, craftsmen and textile workers emigrating from the south.

The artist focused on still life painting throughout his career, employing an austere, tonally restrained palette to produce his signature breakfast pieces (ontbijtgens) and banquet pieces (banketgens), as well as vanitas arrangements, featuring skulls, extinguished candles and other objects symbolising life’s brevity.

In this finely observed breakfast piece, Claesz. seems to invite the viewer to partake of the repast by situating the partially linen-covered table close to the picture plane and by placing the knife and spiralling lemon peel in such a way that they project outwards. The reflections of the window on the bowl of the roemer also refer to the world on the other side of the panel – that is, the viewer’s space.

This painting is a meditation on appetite and on the importance of regulating it. Various religious and philosophical teachings of the time encouraged sobriety and moderation, no doubt in response to the fact that some members of the fledgling Dutch Republic were, by this point, becoming very wealthy.

Claesz. was at his peak between 1640 and 1650, after which Haarlem, which had provided his clientele, went into economic decline. He never owned a house in the town and he must have died poor, in 1660, as his twin twelve-year-old daughters were sent to an orphanage shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, in his heyday he enjoyed a wide-ranging client base of wealthy and bourgeois collectors.

Tony Magnusson, Curator of European Art, 2016–18