A Dessert

The French title is Fin de collation, the end of a light meal, and that is the moment Heda paints. A pie of dark berries has been broken open and mostly eaten, a spoon left in the crust. Two glasses have tipped over, and walnuts and hazelnuts lie scattered on the white cloth. By 1637 Heda was giving his Haarlem tables more depth, and the Louvre points to how he builds it here, from verticals set hard against horizontals. The tall beaker and the taller glass rise against the flat edge of the table and the straight folds of the hanging cloth. He signed and dated the pewter beaker, Heda 1637. The panel reached France as a spoil of war in 1809, and by 1824 it hung in the royal palace at Compiègne, north of Paris.