These paintings depict a wide variety of foodstuffs – fruit, half a goat’s head, a cardoon, a piece of pork, cold beef cuts and sausages, sweetmeats, wine, and even a sea-bream. All could be found in the kitchens of the wealthy people of the time. They are exhibited in combinations that do not appear to follow the conventional arrangements of foodstuffs in larders, and even contradict today’s health and safety advice: in one picture, a raw cardoon lies alongside some sweetmeats and a glass of wine, while suspended above them are a piece of pork, a sea-bream and some sausages, while in the other, half a goat’s head hangs over a bowl full of quinces. Nevertheless, it is essentially a question of pictorial arrangements in which the artist aimed at visually maximising the variety and scope of the foodstuffs as proof of his skill at representing them. Moreover, what unifies the elements here is the idea of abundance. The pictures try to show a wealth of foods that transmits a sense of well-being to the viewer. The luxury items which are the central pieces of the pictures – two elaborate bowls, one of ceramic and the other of crystal, both incrusted in gold – are of key importance in this respect, setting an appropriate tone of opulence and social refinement. These objects may well have been inventions created by the painter. The owners and viewers of the pictures would not have minded, as they continued to symbolise the trappings of a comfortable lifestyle in which the consumption of the foodstuffs depicted was the norm. In this way, the images could even function as a sort of wish-fulfilment on the part of the owner and viewer, especially in the cultures of the early modern age, when the risk of poverty was a permanent one.

The composition of this pair of pictures, which show a dominant central motif flanked by a series of elements on a stone shelf and others hanging from a beam, typifies the mise-en-scène of many works painted in the 1620s in response to the success of Juan van der Hamen, who has been attributed with these paintings in the past. Evidently, the central motifs recall the use made by this artist of the incrusted blue crystal bowl seen in the picture of fruits and sweetmeats in the Banco de España Collection, which is exhibited here. The long rectangular form of the pictures made them ideal for hanging over the doors or windows of a house of the period, a habitual place for still lifes and landscapes at that time. These canvases exemplify a type of composition that made them easy to read in such settings, with isolated elements in the foreground emphasised with strong lighting against a black background, and arranged in a relatively clear and simple pictorial structure.

The pictures are compositions of elements studied separately, and it is unlikely that the artist took studies of all the objects from life. The luxurious bowls in the centre of the works do not appear to have been painted on the basis of real objects but of other representations, and the ormolu mounts are treated somewhat schematically. However, the surface details of some of the other objects suggest that they are the fruit of observation. See, for example, the details of the surface of the cardoon, or the rich range of colours on the head of the fish and the rind of the melon. The good state of preservation of the still lifes allows full appreciation of the assured and fluid brushwork in these paintings, similar to that of Alejandro de Loarte (1590/1600-1626). Regrettably, the signature to the left of the bowl of melons has been repainted and is now practically impossible to decipher with the naked eye: “Juº frt Jn / fapd”.

Peter Cherry

This painting is paired with the signed work Kitchen Still-Life. That explains the lack of a signature here, as it is common practice for only one of the canvases to be signed when two are painted as a set.

The elements, the technique and the arrangement are very typical here. The near ritual principle of symmetry that appears so often in the works of Van der Hamen, particularly in those dated around 1623, is found again in this painting and in its pair. In an extraordinarily subtle way, it is using a system of visual, rigorous and yet flexible compensations. Art expert Stirling explains that this subjecting of the still-life – a genre considered inferior and vulgar in the hierarchy of pictorial genres of the 17^th century – to the mathematical discipline of order and reasons implied by symmetry is no more than a conscious desire to ennoble the genre and an attempt to give it with a core of reason and an intellectual depth to dignify it. It is no wonder that Van der Hamen, closely linked to intellectual circles of poets and writers though his brother Lorenzo, resorted to it.

As regards colour, a particularly noteworthy feature is the subtle refinement of the contrast between the bright green of the central fruit bowl, the gilt appliqués and the warmer tones of the meat and of the fruit, which bring out the other hues of green in the leaves, grapes and the ceramic bowl, showcasing all Van der Hamen’s mastery in that economy of colour.

Alfonso Pérez Sánchez