Still Life with Tazza

This table has been left in the middle of a meal. A big green rummer, the Dutch wine glass, stands over pewter plates with a lemon, plump olives, a bread roll and a handful of nuts, and on the right a richly worked silver drinking cup, the tazza of the title, has been tipped onto its side. Each thing catches the light in its own way. Claesz and his fellow Haarlem painter Willem Heda introduced this kind of picture, a banquet piece in little more than greys, browns and greens, and the Mauritshuis counts this one among his finest. Look at the knife. Claesz signed there, his PC monogram and the year 1636 on the blade itself. The museum received the panel in 2002 as a gift from the collector Willem, Baron van Dedem, yet it was lent straight back to him, and it stayed in his London house, then with his widow, until 2016.