Floris van Schooten

Floris van Schooten worked in Haarlem through the first half of the 17th century, laying out breakfasts and kitchen tables for a living, bread and cheese, herring, a glass of wine, pewter and pottery set on a plain stone ledge. His family had come from Amsterdam around 1612, part of a wave of Catholic households that moved to Haarlem when Protestant control of Amsterdam made life there harder for them.

He was a careful follower rather than a pioneer. As the Haarlem still-life painters around him, among them Floris van Dyck and Pieter Claesz, invented the sober, near-monochrome breakfast piece, van Schooten took up each new idea and put it to work, so that his output reads almost like a running record of how Dutch still life developed in those decades. He also painted large market and kitchen scenes in the older manner of crowded food stalls.

Only one fully signed picture by him is known, a breakfast still life now in Wuppertal in Germany, yet scholars securely credit him with dozens more from his monogram. He served as dean of Haarlem's Guild of Saint Luke in 1639 and was buried in the city in 1656.