Still Life with Assorted Fruit

In this small painting Pieter Claesz presents an array of perfectly ripe fruits, a few nuts, and a luminous glass of white wine on a freshly pressed plain-damask tablecloth. One of the earliest examples of a still life focused primarily on assorted fruit (a fruijtagie) and a key painting in Claesz’s early career, it abandons the traditional wide, high bird’s-eye viewpoint for a compact composition and a more direct, frontal vantage. Intense light from the upper left illuminates the vivid hues of the assembled foodstuffs, reflecting off smooth surfaces, casting shadows, and refracting the casement window of the room through the delicate greenish glass of the berkemeyer; an elegant knife diagonally balanced on the edge of the table connects the array with the viewer, while a thorny branch of golden gooseberries and an overturned silver spoon direct the eye into the composition. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.