Still Life with Pots

Zurbaran spent his career painting monks and saints for the monasteries of Seville, figures standing alone in a dark, hushed space. Around 1650 he turned that same attention onto four clay and metal vessels lined up on a bare wooden ledge. There is a pewter plate holding a gilt cup, and jugs of the pale, porous earthenware they made in Triana, the potters' district across the river from Seville. Each pot sits apart from the next, evenly spaced, lit from the left against a black ground. Nothing overlaps and nothing spills. He gives these ordinary kitchen objects the stillness he gave his praying saints, so the group feels less like a table and more like a quiet ceremony. The collector Francesc Cambo gave the painting to the Prado in 1940.