Historical

Historical - Breakfast Items

Breakfast items, 1646 - Pierer Claesz
Oil on wood
60x84 cm

• Made by a dutch painter therefore coming from the period where the genre of still life paintings originated. The main goal of still life paintings is to create an optical illusion and make the viewers forget that the picture is an illusion of reality.
• His early works show an influence of older still life painters, but soon changed his style and limited his compositions to a small meal set near the corner of the table. This typically featured some bread or cheese on a small platter, a piece of meat on a pewter dish, a glass of beer or wine (perhaps a silvery pewter vessel), and a white crumpled tablecloth – suggesting a light breakfast or snack.
• Pieter Claesz’s still life’s prove to be very realistic due to the amazing detail in the lighting reflected on the items in the composition. The lighting serves for a tonal emphasis for the painting giving it more depth. Pieter reacted to the comprehensive forces of light and atmosphere which envelop us and the things with which we live.
• The foreground of their unpretentious arrangements is spacious, and there is clear recession. Instead of vivid local colours, monochromatic harmonies with sensitive contrasts of valeurs of low intensity are favoured, without however a loss of earlier regard for textual differentiation. From the point of view of composition, tonal, and spatial treatment, the still life’s created by Pieter Claesz are among the most satisfying Dutch paintings made during the century.
• His early work incorporates brilliant colours but as he matured as an artist, his palette was much more subtle. His compositions acquired more elegance, broadness and nonchalance than previously. Nevertheless, the objects in his still life’s rarely overlap. For Pieter Claesz, the principal aim was to render the materials and catch the reflected light as accurately as possible. This was his speciality.