Still Life with Four Vessels

Zurbaran spent his working life supplying the monasteries of Seville, its Carthusians and Hieronymites, men who lived under vows of silence, and something of that hush settles over this row of ordinary vessels. Four of them, in metal and glazed clay, stand along a bare ledge, evenly spaced, none of them touching, each lifted out of the darkness by a steady, even light. There is no fruit spilling over, no anecdote, only the quiet weight of everyday objects looked at very hard. He gave these humble kitchen pots the same grave attention he brought to his saints. A near-twin of the composition hangs in the Prado in Madrid, and both pictures passed through the hands of one man, the Catalan financier Francesc Cambo, who left his Barcelona version to this museum.