Still Life with Peaches in a Chinese Porcelain Bowl

In 1638, when Isaak Soreau signed this panel at the corner of the table, the Thirty Years' War was in its 20th year, and much of the countryside around Frankfurt had been fought over and left hungry. On the table he set something that had traveled halfway around the world. It is a Chinese porcelain bowl from the kilns at Jingdezhen, the blue-and-white export ware that Dutch ships were carrying into Europe by the shipload. He filled it with plain local fruit, peaches and a few grapes with the leaves still on the stem, and set it close to us against a dark ground. The costly foreign bowl and the everyday peaches share one small table. You can find his signature and the date in the lower left, written along the table's edge.