Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus

Antwerp in the early 1560s was the great trading city of northern Europe, and this kitchen is stocked like one of its markets. There are cabbages, a cauliflower, grapes, pears, a large cut of meat, a pheasant and a turkey, a bird first shipped to Europe from Mexico earlier in that century. The story in the title is easy to miss. Look through the arch at the upper right, where three small figures walk on a road. They are Christ and two disciples on the way to Emmaus. In the Gospel of Luke the pair fail to recognise him until he breaks bread with them that evening. Before 1948 the panel belonged to the heirs of Joseph Hopkinson in the United States, and since 1961 it has been on long-term loan to the Mauritshuis from the De Boer Foundation in Amsterdam.