Still Life with a Gilded Beer Tankard

A tall gilded beer tankard, a rummer glass and scattered bread and nuts stand arranged on a bare table, the light falling across polished metal and glass in near-monochrome tones of grey and brown. Willem Claesz Heda was the great master of the Dutch breakfast piece, and this still life of 1634 is among his most famous. The famous sobriety of such paintings — their silvery palette and sense of orderly plenty suddenly interrupted — is captured here at the height of the artist’s early maturity, earning the work its place among the most admired still lifes of the Haarlem school.