Still Life with Meat and a Basket of Cheese

In the 17th century a picture like this was called an ontbijtje, a little breakfast, because everything on the table belongs to a light meal. Here there is ham, bread, mustard, wine and cheese in a wicker basket. The Museum of Fine Arts points out that the food was ordinary Dutch fare while the blue-and-white dishes came from China, and that Claesz set himself the task of telling apart glass, pewter, cheese, wicker, porcelain and wine, each by its own surface. The museum dates the panel to about 1627.

Its known history starts late, in London in 1931, and through the 1930s it passed between several dealers there. By 1955 it was in a private collection in Hilversum, in the Netherlands. When Haarlem, Zürich and Washington staged a large exhibition of Claesz's work in 2004 and 2005, the panel was number 10 in the catalogue. Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo, collectors in Marblehead, Massachusetts, bought it in 2009 and gave it to the museum in 2021, in support of its Center for Netherlandish Art.