Still Life

This canvas dates to about 1615, when a picture of nothing but objects, fruit, vessels, flowers on a table, was still a fairly new idea. For centuries such things had appeared only as details inside a larger religious or portrait scene. Around 1600 painters in Italy and the Low Countries began giving them a frame of their own, asking the viewer to look hard at the ordinary. The painter of this one is not recorded, one of many working an idea that was only then becoming a subject worth a frame.