The Four Elements

By the time Stoskopff painted this around 1635, he had worked in Paris for years, where cultivated collectors liked a big idea tucked inside an ordinary scene. Here the whole cosmos is folded into a kitchen. The four elements the ancients believed everything was made from show up as plain objects: fire in a lit stove, air in the birds, water in a wooden tub where a carp is still swimming, with earth to complete the set. Look hard at that tub and the trick appears. He paints it from the front, from above and from inside at once, bending the perspective so your eye is led around the water instead of resting on it. The little panel hangs today in Basel and measures about 55 by 73 centimetres.