Still Life in a Cupboard

A painted cupboard, dated 1538, holds a candlestick, a book, a vase, a wedge of cheese and a few apples on plain wooden shelves, worked in oil on a square panel. What makes it unusual is that date. In 1538 a picture of ordinary household objects and nothing else was a rare thing to make. The kind of independent still life this looks like to us did not become common in the Netherlands until around 1600, and the name now used for such pictures was only coined later. So an anonymous Netherlandish painter was doing something ahead of its habit, treating shelves of everyday things as a subject worth a panel of their own. Look low among the food and you will find a small mouse, the kind of lively detail these painters liked to tuck into a corner.