Still Life with Cheese, Herring, Bread and Wine

Cheese, a salted herring, bread and a glass of wine, set out on a plain ledge in Haarlem around 1620. The herring is the reason the rest of it is there. Dutch busses fished the North Sea through the season and gutted and salted the catch in barrels on board, which let them stay out for weeks and sell the fish as far as the Baltic. A proverb of the period had it that Amsterdam was built on herring bones. The sober breakfast piece was a recent invention in Haarlem when van Schooten laid this one out on a panel of about 42 by 57 centimetres. It is in Athens because the National Technical University gave it to the National Gallery, the same school that handed over the core of the national collection in 1900.