Still Life with Peacock Pie

A tall baked pie crowned with the head, wings and tail of a peacock — a pink rose in its beak — rises over a table spread with an ivory cloth and crowded with pewter plates, Wan-li porcelain bowls and glass, the feast including a cooked fowl, olives, lemons, peaches, nuts, candied sweets and a gilded salt cellar, with a nubby-stemmed berkemeier of white wine catching the light. Pieter Claesz, the leading still-life painter of Haarlem, signed and dated the picture 1627, and its more-than-four-foot width, near life-size objects and crisply harmonized light made it one of the grandest of his early “monochrome” banquet pieces, the peacock a delicacy reserved for the most special occasions. The precisely rendered textures — the pebbly lemon peel, the crumpled napkin, the sheen of pewter — carry the eye across the tabletop as an extension of the viewer’s space. The panel was acquired in 2013 through the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.