Joachim Beuckelaer

Step up to one of his big canvases and the first thing you meet is food. Sides of meat, plucked poultry, baskets of cabbages and fish laid out on a market stall so close you could almost price them. Joachim Beuckelaer painted these market and kitchen scenes in Antwerp in the 1560s, piling the foreground with produce on a scale nobody had quite tried before.

He came out of a family of painters and trained with his uncle by marriage, Pieter Aertsen, who had more or less invented this kind of picture. Beuckelaer took it further. Look past the groaning stall and you often find a small second scene tucked into the background, Christ visiting the sisters Martha and Mary, or led out before the crowd, so that the abundance of the flesh sits in front of a quiet lesson about what matters more.

He became a master in Antwerp's painters' guild in 1560 and was dead by his early forties. His stacked markets travelled far. The idea of giving humble food the whole front of a serious painting fed directly into the still-life tradition that took hold across the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. Four of his canvases, one for each of the ancient elements of earth, water, air and fire, hang together in London as The Four Elements.