Fruit still life

By 1645 the sober breakfast tables that had made Haarlem still life famous were giving way to something riper and more colourful, and here is van Schooten, near the end of a long career, turning to fruit. He was about 60, roughly a decade before he was buried in the city in 1656. Where his early pieces set out bread and cheese in browns and greys, a fruit piece let him work in the fuller colours that Dutch buyers now wanted on their walls, laid on a plain ledge and lit so you can read every skin and bloom. He had spent some 40 years following each turn in the fashion for these table pictures rather than leading it, and this late panel shows him still keeping pace, painting for a Republic that was by then wealthy and within a few years of ending its long war with Spain.