Still Life with a Roemer

Food has been a theme in art since ancient times. From classical Greece and Rome, murals and mosaics with fruit and luxury foods have been preserved. In the written sources of ancient renowned painters and their competitions at being the best to imitate nature, one of the most beloved and quoted anecdotes deals precisely with Zeuxis’ painting of fruit. When the Dutch painter Philips Angel (ca. 1618 – after 1664) published a poetic tribute to painting, Lof der schilder-kunst (1642), he began his text with this anecdote. In 1652 the Flemish/Dutch still life painter Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606-83/84) signed and dated his painting Still Life with a Roemer. The table is covered for a snack with plum, apricot, peach, grapes, some seafood and the indispensable lemon. The painter may have been sending a greeting to Zeuxis with the grape, which appears as a reflection in the yellow bright light on the glass of white wine. While the roemer wine goblet’s impasto painted light reflections are yellowish, the reflections of the pewter plate are completely white. On the edge of the plate a reflection of the cross-window makes a faintly noticeable pattern, yet very clear. The entire composition is in balance, the foreshortenings are perfectly executed and the harmony of the colors unsurpassed. Perhaps it was the artist's ambition to paint what cannot be painted: the atmosphere in the room and the light as the natural phenomenon; the lightning sparkle of the light reflexes, the light as flickering backlight and the light as a diagonal beam of illuminated dust particles. Angel advocates a way of handling the brush, which should incarnate the essence of nature in its lightness and imitate the atmosphere of nature through its inherent space-creative effect. Angel talks of a ‘sweet-flowing brush’, which evokes a ‘sweet receding’ because without it, one cannot practice any one of the listed technical skills in the toolbox of painting. With his painting, de Heem may have wanted to demonstrate his skills as a painter capable of imitating the depths of nature, what at the time was called ‘houding’.