Still life. Breakfast Piece in a Stone Niche

A special type of still life is about the remains of meal. This theme became popular in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where the almost monochrome fashion of painting developed during the 1630s and 1640s. The protagonist artists are Pieter Claesz (c.1597/98-1660) and Willem Heda (1594-1680). An unknown artist from their immediate circle has painted Still life. Breakfast Piece in a Stone Niche. Someone has eaten what was on the pewter plate; only a bit of olive is left remaining on a plate of Chinese porcelain. On the move, the unfortunate guest has overturned a silver tazza, but two beautiful glasses, half-filled with wine, are left standing. The artist lets us think for a moment that the layout is part of our own reality, because the wall is cut off by the edge of the picture, and the pewter plate and the knife seems to topple out of the picture plane and extend into the viewers space. The deceptive realism is reinforced in the very way of using the brush - the artist imitates the surface structure of the various objects. That is, the lemon's shell is bulging and uneven, the underside of the silver tazza has the silversmith's processing imprinted as tangible surface structure. Both parts make the light in the existing room (i.e., now the museum’s exhibition hall) reflect and flicker in the same way as it would have done in real life. An important element in this and many other still lifes is that the artist wants to deceive his audience.