Peaches in a porcelain bowl

By 1690, when Abraham van Calraet set this bowl down, the Dutch Golden Age was in its last decades, and two very different luxuries had ended up on the same table. In this cool climate the peaches were a rich man's fruit, coaxed along warm sheltered garden walls through a short Dutch summer. The bowl beside them is Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, carried halfway around the world by the Dutch East India Company and still costly enough to display rather than use. Calraet worked his whole life in Dordrecht and painted this kind of fruit piece again and again. The peaches are life-size, one split open to show the stone and the blush of ripe flesh.