Still Life with Fruit and Wineglasses on a Silver Plate

For years nobody was sure this was a Kalf. The collector Willem van Dedem bought it in 1995 regardless, and that same year the signature turned up, the name kalf written small in the upper left corner. It is now dated to around 1660.

The table is draped with an Oriental carpet and a crumpled white napkin. On a silver plate lie an orange, still on a sprig with its leaves, and a lemon half stripped of its peel. Behind them stand two glasses, a slender one in the Venetian manner and a broad roemer, the German wine glass with raised drops of glass on its stem. Almost everything happens in the light on a dark ground, picked out along the rim of the silver and in the reflections on each glass.

The painting had once belonged to the Earls Spencer at Althorp, their house in Northamptonshire. Van Dedem gave it to the Friends of the Mauritshuis in 2002, and it has been on show in the museum since 2016.