KALF, Willem

This type of peasant interiors was a speciality of the Rotterdam painters Pieter de Bloot, Herman Saftleven and Hendrick Sorgh. Kalf appears to have painted peasant interiors only during the first half of the 1640s, when he was living in Paris. He probably sold his Parisian products through a local dealer, to mostly middle-class buyers.

This picture shows a pronk still-life with Holbein bowl (a rock-crystal bowl, now in the Munich Schatzkammer, designed by Hans Holbein the Younger for Henry VIII), Nautilus cup, glass goblet and fruit dish. Between the Holbein bowl and the porcelain bowl is a pocket watch with an open crystal lid and a key suspended on a blue string.

This canvas show a still-life with silver, pewter and gilt objects on a partly draped table. It is an early work by Kalf showing the influence of Jan Jansz. den Uyl.

The best representative of the classical period of Dutch still-life painting is Willem Kalf. He was born in Rotterdam, where he was probably influenced by Fran�ois Rijckhals (after 1600-47), a Middelburg painter best known for his small peasant scenes which include displays of fruit and vegetables, and of impressive pronk still-lifes that include sumptuous gold and silver vessels. Kalf began by painting similar motifs: little pictures of kitchens and barns, as well as large still-lifes of metalwork, glass, and porcelain. As in the work of other pronk still-life painters, the same costly objects appear in his paintings more than once. Since he was a dealer in works of art as well as a painter he may have used objects in his stock as models.

This is a typical illustration of the type of still-life of which Kalf was an outstanding specialist. The still-lifes by Kalf look very different from those of his predecessors (like Pieter Claesz. and Willem Heda). They are, in a sense, much more theatrical; in their sonorous quality they bring to mind the landscapes of his contemporary, Jacob van Ruisdael.

In the paintings by Heda or Pieter Claesz., the objects are ordered in a simple way; they are just laid out on the table. The light is even; shadows are used only to emphasize each object’s plastic form. The still-life is generally set in a rather wide space (the painting itself being oblong). In Kalf’s paintings, however, the space is narrowed. The backgrounds is much darker; and in this narrow space, against this background, the still-life seems curiously isolated. A soft light picks out each different object, showing its unique quality and colour, as spotlights focus on actors on a dark stage. In the narrow space, the arrangement too is much tighter.

For this rich, glowing kind of still-life the 17th centuy used an apt term, “pronkstilleven” (still-life of ostentation); and part of the content of this term is certainly the choice of objects itself. In Heda and Claesz. food and utensils appear that belong to normal life: bread, beer, fish, plates and jugs of pewter or ordinary glass. Kalf (and his contemporary Abraham van Beyeren too) uses almost exclusively objects that are extraordinary: vessels of silver and gold, chalices of china, lobster, tropical fruit, displayed against rich Persian cloth.

This still-life depicts a marble tabletop with Herat carpet, sporting fruit, Venetian wine glass, and Northern rum glass. There is also a covered Huan-Li porcelain sugar bowl.

Willem Kalf spent a few years in Paris as a young artist. There, he encountered new tendencies in still-life painting and absorbed them in his own work. Shortly after his return to Holland, he developed his own personal style of painting, rich still-lifes of luxury items - silver cups and dishes, Chinese porcelain vessels and elaborate Venetian-style wine glasses - mysteriously lit, displayed before a dark background, and often placed on an eastern tablecloth. Despite the high quality and luxury status of the objects he rendered, the compositions of those still-lifes are often restricted in their opulence. Kalf would concentrate on a few items per painting, which he would render to their best advantage - perfectly arranged and dramatically lit. More often than not, his lighting had the effect of modern spotlights.

Exceptionally for a still-life specialist, the Rotterdam-born Kalf was praised by an Amsterdam poet as one of the city’s leading painters. Perhaps the praise would not have been forthcoming had he persevered in his first interest: shabby peasant barn interiors and still-lifes of humble kitchen implements, painted during his stay in Paris from about 1640 to 1646. After his arrival in Amsterdam, however, following his marriage to a cultivated young woman of good family, Kalf began to paint the type of still-life for which he is best known.

Called in Dutch pronkstilleven (‘still-lifes of display or ostentation’), these compositions, influenced by Flemish antecedents, feature luxury manufactured goods - silverware, Chinese porcelain, Oriental carpets, fragile glass - and exotic foodstuffs. They do not seem to have specific symbolic meaning but must have spoken to contemporary viewers of the wealth of the Dutch Republic, the might of its sea power and the efficiency of its distribution systems - for all this is implied in the eastern table carpet and in the fresh Italian lemon unwinding its peel in the foreground.

The buffalo-horn in a silver mount belonged to the Saint Sebastian Archers’ Guild, part of the city’s civic guard. Dated 1565, this beautiful example of the silversmith’s art, now in the Historisch Museum in Amsterdam, also testifies to the old Netherlandish tradition of municipal freedom, and the will of Dutch burghers to defend it. Kalf was to paint it more than once; it also appears in pictures by other artists.

Ultimately, however, none of these associations is responsible for the grave monumental beauty of Kalf’s painting. As in all his mature works, only a few objects are displayed and soberly arranged, in contrast with the luxuriant profusion of Flemish still-lifes. Against a dark background, succulent paint, broadly applied, models large forms and captures the very feel of surface textures. Strong accents of the richest and brightest colours surge to the surface - the huge scarlet lobster, the clear yellow and white lemon, touched with pink where it reflects the lobster. And it is the play of reflections and tinted shadows of these powerful hues which, like a musical motif, draws the composition together.

The present painting comes from the period when Kalf’s career was flourishing in Amsterdam, the artistic capital of the Netherlands. The composition, in its clarity, fine balance, and comparative simplicity, is typical of Kalf’s style during the second half of the 1650s.

This still-life depicts a marble tabletop with Herat carpet, sporting fruit, Venetian wine glass, and Northern rum glass.

The middle axis of this painting is formed by a roemer wine glass with an elaborate handle. Placed in front of a dark niche, it is partly lit by the small amount of light that shines on it. The light is also refracted by the transparent glass and the wine itself. On the marble table there are three bergamot or Seville oranges and a lemon. Jutting out over the table’s edge, a knife with a polished agate handle protrudes through the bright yellow lemon peel, and the porous strip of skin, peeled off in one piece, curls around like a festoon, forming a decorative counterpart to the narrow pointed orange leaves. Showing sweet and sour citrus fruits together in this way, the artist symbolically admonishes the viewer to be temperate and to add lemon and orange juice to wine, as they were considered to have medicinal, humoral and pathological properties.

The presence of the watch in this still-life might suggest the idea of the passing of time and the transience of life.

Still-life painting occasionally registers the pride that contemporaries took in global trade and colonial endeavour. Like the botanical gardens and finest collections, still-lifes gathered disparate objects from all reaches of Dutch trade, and brought them home, re-presenting them in European terms of science and collecting, without specific concern about their origin. In this painting of fine household items, Willem Kalf effortlessly combined Venetian and Dutch glassware, a recently made Chinese jar for luxury ginger, a Dutch silver dish, a Mediterranean peach, and a half-peeled lemon, the object of citrus trade and of medicinal treatises. He displayed them on an Indian floral carpet, in a dramatic spotlight that invites contemplation and admiration, for the fine wares as well as the artist’s recrafting of them. Kalf’s jewel technique evokes their value and unifies them in an arrangement, that, however lifelike for each individual object, is clearly pictorial.

One of the most characteristic types of painting in Holland in the seventeenth century was still-life which was brought to a higher level of refinement there than anywhere else in Europe. Some still-lifes have symbolic meanings - the vanity of earthly wealth - but others, including those of the greatest practitioner of this genre, Willem Kalf, seem to be simply pronkstilleven, lavish displays of ceramics, glassware, gold and silver vessels as well as exotic food. They reflect a new willingness of rich Dutchmen to parade their possessions, an attitude which would have been frowned upon by an earlier, more puritanical generation.

Kalf was born in Rotterdam and probably trained in the studio of Fran�ois Ryckhals in Middelburg, a town with a long established tradition of still-life painting. Subsequently he lived for some years in Paris where he met Flemish still-life artists, whose painterly style softened the linearity of Kalf’s earliest manner. Kalf returned to Rotterdam but settled in Amsterdam in 1653 with his wife Cornelia Pluvier, a distinguished glassengraver, poetess and musician. In the following year Kalf was praised by the poet Jan Vos as one of the city’s leading painters: he was much sought after by prosperous citizens anxious to record their treasures. This particular painting includes a richly decorated nautilus cup and a Wan-Li bowl, which were no doubt prized possessions of the unknown Amsterdammer who commissioned the still-life.

Kalf depicted decorative objects - such as Chinese porcelain soup tureens, preciously decorated nautilus goblets and costly carpets - his paintings seem to have been dominated not so much by wealth and prosperity as by the aesthetic values and optical qualities of perception that emanated from these objects. Thus, the refraction of the light on the objects and the modification of the colours as mirrored by each of the other objects become the real subject of his art. Kalf achieved his effects by giving objects a bright luminescence, further emphasized by a dark background a method which made him a remote kinsman of the Caravaggists. His objects only exist to the extent that they can be perceived, but in order to be perceived they need light to dispel that darkness which is the original state of the world.

However, unlike Caravaggio and his successors, Kalf avoided beaming any harsh shafts of light onto an object. Instead, his light is more subdued and diffuse, with a source that cannot be exactly identified (though it usually comes from above). It gives each object a minimum of brightness so that it shines faintly and transparently from within here and there, for example on the edge of a silver bowl, although there are also brightly shining spots in some places. The light dissolves, as it were, the material properties of the objects: delicately thin Chinese porcelain is perceived as fragile, brittle and transparent, penetrated softly by the light. Half-peeled oranges and lemons, with their skins spiralling down artistically, have their fruity flesh displayed in such a way that their drop-like fibres flicker golden in the light.

Kalf’s paintings are among the most sophisticated of Dutch still-lifes. Taking a much more Baroque and decorative approach than Heda, he filled his paintings with sumptuous and exquisite objects which would only have been found in the most aristocratic and wealthy circles.

This painting, depicting a woman pulling water from a well, a pile of vegetables at her feet, is an example of Kalf’s Parisian period. The outstanding feature of the painting is the pile of vegetables at the woman’s feet, a still-life within a larger genre scene. This corner of the work hints at the skill and precision that characterise the dedicated still-lifes, which Kalf painted later in his career.