Still Life with a Salt

A loaf of bread and a fish rest on pewter plates, a roemer of wine stands at the right, and a salt cellar is set at the back of the table, with a knife and a few hazelnuts laid out beside them — the plain meal that Dutch painters called a banketje, a little banquet. Pieter Claesz, who was born near Antwerp about 1597 and worked in Haarlem from the early 1620s until his death in 1660, made such tables the whole of his subject and became the leading master of the Haarlem still life. In the 1630s he and his colleague Willem Claesz. Heda pared their palettes back almost to greys, browns and ochres, and built their pictures out of the fall of light across pewter, glass and bread crust rather than out of colour; this panel, painted in the early 1640s, carries the ligated monogram of his initials just to the right of the glass. The stillness of these arrangements — a meal interrupted, the objects placed with the severity of architecture — has kept them among the most admired paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. The work is held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.