Still Life with Sweets and Pottery

A woven basket of fruit, a pewter dish piled with sugar-dusted pastries, glass jars sealed with twists of paper, round wooden boxes and terracotta vessels are arranged across gray stone ledges of different heights, light falling from the left into a shadow nearly black — the bodegón of the Madrid court, painted with a clarity that made Juan van der Hamen y León the most celebrated still-life painter of early seventeenth-century Spain. Van der Hamen, painter to Philip IV, signed and dated the canvas 1627, at the height of a career cut short by his death in 1631; his still lifes of sweets and confections, made for the noble households of Madrid, carried the genre from the kitchen into the refined world of the palace. The picture may be identical to a still life owned at his death in 1655 by Diego de Messía, Marqués de Leganés, and it came to the National Gallery of Art in 1961 with the Samuel H. Kress Collection. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.