Still Life with Herring, Oysters and Smokes

Two smoked herrings, plates of opened oysters, a loaf and a glass of white wine, and next to them everything a smoker needed in Haarlem around 1625. There is a white clay pipe, a red earthenware brazier of glowing embers for lighting it, a bundle of matches and an oval pewter tobacco tin with copper fittings. The Frans Hals Museum points out that fish, shellfish and tobacco make an odd meal, and that they gave van Schooten the range of surfaces his buyers liked to see. The panel's later life was far less settled. In 1943 it was sold from an Amsterdam collection, probably through a middleman, to German buyers, and it ended up among the paintings gathered for the museum Hitler planned in Linz, in Austria. After the war it came into the care of the Dutch state. In 2003, on the advice of the Dutch restitution committee, it was returned to its rightful owners, and in 2011 the Frans Hals Museum bought it with help from the Rembrandt Society.