Breakfast Still-Life
by MAHU, Cornelis, Oil on wood, 58 x 87 cm
From around 1625-30 a new type emerged in Dutch still-life painting: the ‘monochrome banquet’, which was marked by a diagonal arrangement - with the objects grouped together in a synthesis - and a grey-brown monotone, giving these still-lifes a more realistic and less artificial appearance. This stylistic evolution of the still-life, which in the North is linked particularly with the names of the Haarlem painters Pieter Claesz. and Willem Heda, found its most prominent representative in the South in the person of Cornelis Mahu.
In the 1630s Mahu followed the Haarlem painters closely, and some of his paintings are direct, if somewhat stiff, copies of Heda.
The present still-life shows on a table a plate with a pate and nuts, a salt barrel, a folded pot, a Roemer and a beer glass. It is signed on the knife blade: Co. Mahu.