Pronk still life

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Original: oil on canvas 242.5 x 185 cm wxh

Adriaen shows here that he can really paint anything. You can almost feel and touch the objects here. Look at that beautiful bright yellow lemon, and that little peel hanging over the table. Incredibly well done. All the things in the painting seem to have been put down in a spontaneous and messy way, but Adriaen van Utrecht has thought them through.

If you look closely, you can see that he has arranged all the objects very precisely across the painting. This overlapping of all those objects, putting things in front of and behind each other, was completely thought out by Adriaan van Utrecht. As a painter, you could show how good you were at expressing material. The white tablecloth or the beautiful glasses, for example. So transparent that you could hardly see them. Or the shiny golden goblet, the bowl or that beautiful wood. And that combined with light and shadow effects the painting; incredibly difficult. Often, painting a still life was also a test for a young painter to show off his craftsmanship.

But why was this such a popular genre, a table full of expensive objects and food? It was a sign of wealth anyway, you could show off what you had. Showing off. A bit like now: a lot of attention paid to fancy food, which looks very nice. Still life paintings often adorned the homes of seventeenth century rich, prosperous, well fed people.

How did the Dutch get all those luxury products that we see here in the painting? That was because of international trade. In the Golden Age, the Dutch sailed to the West and the East and brought back all kinds of luxury products. The warehouses were full of them.