Still Life

By 1655 the Dutch had turned the modest meal into a whole genre of painting. On this table are the things an ordinary Haarlem household used: a green Rhenish wine glass called a roemer, a bread roll, a few carrots, and a clay pipe. Over the previous decades painters such as Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda had drained the colour from these scenes until browns and greys carried almost everything, and this small canvas, about 64 by 56 centimetres, keeps to that tonal manner. The pipe is the most modern thing on the table. Tobacco had reached Dutch homes only a generation or two before, and the cheap white clay pipe, most of them turned out in the town of Gouda, was by mid-century an everyday object. In pictures like this the thin pipe and the half-eaten bread also carried a familiar hint that such pleasures were passing. The wine glass is the kind that was blown with a stem of applied glass drops so it would not slip from a greasy hand.