Breakfast

Around 1615, painters in Haarlem were working out a new kind of picture: the ontbijtje, or breakfast piece, a plain meal laid on a bare table and studied up close. This is one of them. Van Schooten keeps the colours sober, mostly black, brown and yellow, and leaves out the silver goblets other painters used to show off. What he does include is a shallow blue-and-white plate. That is Chinese porcelain, carried halfway round the world by the Dutch East India Company, and on a Haarlem table it quietly marked how far the city's trade now reached. The food carried a second meaning his buyers caught at once. Bread, cheese and fruit look abundant, yet all of it spoils, a reminder that earthly pleasures do not last. He painted it while the Dutch were still fighting their long war of independence against Spain, in the same years the sea voyages were making the Republic rich.