Pieter Claesz

Pieter Claesz spent his career in Haarlem painting tables just after someone has stepped away from them. His speciality was the breakfast piece, a modest spread of a herring or an oyster or two, a half-peeled lemon, a roll of bread and a tall glass of beer, all shown with the crumbs and the crooked knife left behind.

He worked in a narrow, almost monochrome range of silvery greys, browns and greens, so that the whole picture feels lit by the same overcast Dutch daylight, and he was a master of surfaces, the sweat on a pewter jug, the shine of a curling lemon peel.

Sometimes he tipped the arrangement toward a warning, adding a skull, an overturned glass and a guttering candle to remind the viewer that meals and lives both end. Claesz kept refining these quiet tabletops until his death in Haarlem.