Still Life with Cheese

In the early 17th century, painters in Haarlem, in the Dutch Republic, turned an ordinary laid table into a subject of its own. Their breakfast pieces showed a simple meal set out and not yet touched. This canvas belongs to that family, though nobody knows who painted it or where. The Belvedere dates it to somewhere between 1640 and 1700. A cut loaf, a thick wedge of cheese on a metal plate, two onions, a glass of amber drink and a single herring on a round wooden board sit along a grey ledge. Behind them stands a tall jug covered in moulded relief, with a hinged metal lid. The picture came to the museum in 2020 as a gift of the Maurer collection. Before that it belonged to the estate of Serafin Maurer, a Viennese painter who died in 1945.