Still Life with Glasses and Tobacco

At the right of this table lie the things a smoker needs. There are long white clay pipes, a small lidded box, a twist of paper opened to show a little heap of shredded tobacco, and a length of thick cord with a glowing end hanging over the edge of the cloth. Smokers kept such slow-burning cord to light their pipes. Heda dated the panel 1633. Pipes and tobacco had only begun to appear in Haarlem still lifes in the late 1620s, and here they lie among luxuries. The tobacco itself had crossed the Atlantic, much of it grown in the English colony of Virginia, and the Venetian-style glass and the silver beside it were just as costly. A silver tazza, a footed drinking cup, has fallen on its side. A green roemer stands full of pale wine, and on a pewter plate there are a half-peeled lemon and a small biscuit, with olives on another plate behind. Heda held the whole table to greens, greys and dull gold. The panel spent the 19th century in a private collection in Lugano, in Switzerland, and was given to the Museum of Fine Arts in 2019 by Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo, collectors in Massachusetts.