Silver Wine Jug, Ham, and Fruit

A silver wine jug stands among a sliced ham, bread and fruit on a draped table, and the whole arrangement is built to be read from a step or two back. Van Beyeren laid the metals in with broad, energetic strokes that look almost abstract at close range but settle, at a distance, into shimmering reflections — including a faint self-portrait of the painter at his easel, caught in the curve of the jug. The banquet piece of this kind, the pronkstilleven, was made to hang where it would be seen from a little way off, perhaps above a mantelpiece, and it turned the tables and vessels of Dutch prosperity into a display of pure painting. Van Beyeren worked in The Hague, Delft and Amsterdam, and this is one of the works on which his modern reputation as the finest of the Dutch banquet-piece painters rests. The painting is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art.