Object data
oil on panel
support: height 52.6 cm × width 44.1 cm
Pieter Claesz
Still Life with a Salt
c. 1640 - c. 1645
Inscriptions
- signature, in ligated monogram, to the right of the glass: PC
Technical notes
The support consists of two vertically grained oak planks and is slightly bevelled on the top, left and bottom. The panel has probably been trimmed slightly on the right. The thin and smoothly applied ground is light in colour. The paint was applied with broad strokes, with impasto for the highlights. The large objects were reserved.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 24 August 2004
Condition
Fair. The paint layer is abraded.
Conservation
- M. Kuiper, 1987: complete restoration
Provenance
...; sale, Friedrich von Amerling (1803-87), Vienna (Dorotheum), 3 May 1916 sqq., no. 58, as W.C. Heda, Kr. 2,900;...; the dealer G. Arnot, London, as W.C. Heda, 1926;1...; the dealer D.A. Hoogendijk, Amsterdam, 1932;2from whom to Daniël Crena de Iongh (1888-1970), Amsterdam, Washington and Wilton (Conn.), by 1943;3 by whom bequeathed to the museum, but given in usufruct to his widow, Mary Dows Herter Crena de Iongh (1892-1985), 1967; transferred to the museum, 1986; on loan to the Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Muiden, since December 1998
Object number: SK-A-4839
Credit line: Bequeathed by Daniël Crena de Iongh, Wilton, Connecticut
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Pieter Claesz (Berchem 1596/97 - Haarlem 1660)
Pieter Claesz was born in 1596/97 in Berchem, near Antwerp, and not in Steinfurt as was previously thought. He may briefly have been a member of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, for one Pieter Clasen was admitted as a master in its register of 1620.
He settled in Haarlem in 1620/21, where his son Claes Pietersz Berchem (later a famous painter himself) was born in 1622, and where he lived until his death at the end of December 1660. The date of his first marriage must have been before 1622. His second marriage, to Trijntien Lourensdr, took place in August 1635. Documents relating to his life and work in Haarlem cover the period 1628-48, and also record his funeral on 1 January 1661.
Claesz’s name appears in the membership roll of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1634, and on his son’s admission to the guild in 1642 he was referred to as a ‘Banket schilder’ (painter of banquet pieces). Pieter Claesz painted still lifes exclusively, more especially breakfast and banquet pieces, and vanitas scenes. Most of his paintings bear his monogram PC and are dated between 1621 and 1660. His earliest known paintings, most of them breakfast pieces, are in the manner of early Haarlem still-life painters like Floris van Dijck. His mature period shows a grouping of fewer objects in a simpler arrangement and with a monochrome tonality. His works from this period often closely resemble those of his Haarlem colleague Willem Claesz Heda. His later works are more complex, consisting of luxurious displays in bright colours.
He was mentioned as a painter, together with Heda, in Samuel Ampzing’s Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem of 1628. Claesz’s paintings are frequently listed in 17th-century Haarlem estate inventories, but in the 18th and 19th centuries his name was almost completely forgotten. No paintings with his name feature in 18th-century Dutch sale catalogues, and it was only in 1882 that the monogram PC was identified as his.
Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007
References
Ampzing 1628, p. 372; Moes in Thieme/Becker VII, 1912, p. 28; Bergstro¨m 1957, pp. 114-23; Meijer in Saur XIX, 1992, pp. 353-54; Van der Willigen/Meijer 2003, p. 62; Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 134-35; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 124-26
Entry
In addition to the fairly complex still lifes and banquet pieces that Pieter Claesz produced in the 1620s there are also several simple and smaller works from the same period with only a few objects, such as a glass, a knife, a small loaf of bread or a lemon. In the 1630s, his compositions became larger, verging on the monumental. They are broadly painted with a limited palette in which greens, browns and white predominate, with just the occasional colour accent.
Around 1635, he began painting tall upright compositions in addition to horizontal ones, and in them the scene is almost always dominated by a large green rummer of wine.4
This breakfast piece on the edge of a table covered with a white tablecloth consists of a small loaf of bread and a piece of salmon, both on pewter plates, a pewter salt-cellar, a knife and the distinctive rummer with the reflection of the studio window. This simple composition is closely related to a number of paintings by Claesz that are dated between 1640 and 1643,5 which makes it likely that this one dates from the same period. There are one or more copies of this work.6
Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 45.
Literature
Vroom 1945, pp. 29, 48, no. 70; Vroom 1980, I, p. 49, II, pp. 34-35, no. 145; Brunner-Bulst 2004a, p. 277, no. 123, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1992, p. 47, no. A 4839; 2007, no. 45
Citation
J.P. Filedt Kok, 2007, 'Pieter Claesz., Still Life with a Salt, c. 1640 - c. 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8142
(accessed 1 April 2025 02:25:27).Footnotes
- 1 Note RKD.
- 2 Note RKD.
- 3 RKD, The Hague, inv. no. 460, Archive Kunsthandel D.A. Hoogendijk, no. OS 708; note RKD.
- 4 Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 238-40, nos. 61, 63, pp. 244-45, nos. 72, 73, pp. 250-52, nos. 83, 84, pp. 256-57, no. 93, pp. 264-65, nos. 103, 104 (ill.).
- 5 See, for example, Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 81, 83, 256-57, no. 93, pp. 264-65, no. 104, pp. 268-69, no. 110, p. 272, no. 117, p. 274, no. 120 (ill.).
- 6 See Brunner-Bulst 2004a, p. 277; Fred G. Meijer referred us to a copy attributed to W.C. Heda with Gimbels in New York in 1945, and to another one listed as being by C. Kruijs with B. Koetser in London; illustrated in Art News XLVII (September 1945), p. 25 and Apollo LXXXVIII (December 1968), p. cxli, respectively.