Still Life with a Silver Jug

When Kalf painted this in the later 1650s, Chinese porcelain was becoming scarce in Amsterdam. The Ming dynasty had fallen in 1644, and the wars that followed disrupted the kilns that supplied the Dutch ships. The blue and white bowl tipped on its side here is of a type made under the Wanli emperor, who died in 1620. The Rijksmuseum notes that Kalf seldom painted the common Asian wares of his day, choosing rare pieces that were already decades old, and sometimes combined several objects into one. The pattern inside this bowl belongs to an older kind of flat-rimmed bowl the Dutch called a klapmuts, while the outside follows a piece from Kalf's own time. Next to it stand an ornate silver jug and a glass of white wine in a gilded holder, and a gold watch lies on a ribbon at the edge of the stone ledge.