Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables, with Christ at Emmaus in the Background

Entry

The foreground of this painting is completely filled with a lavish display of vegetables and fruit. The large baskets with beans, peas, cherries, strawberries, currants, plums, medlars, grapes, bundles of asparagus, carrots, turnips, gherkins, red and green cabbages, strings of onions and so forth are laid out on a broad stone plinth. Behind them is a young maidservant going indoors with a basket of apples, while another one on the left is kneeling by the hearth stirring a pan. Two curtains at the back have been pulled back to reveal the scene of the Supper at Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35).

The combination of a profusion of food with a biblical scene in the background, such as Christ in the house of Martha and Mary or the Supper at Emmaus, was repeatedly depicted by 16th-century painters like Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer. The contrast between the abundance in the foreground and the biblical scene is designed to remind the viewer that the plentifulness of earthly food is only a fleeting pleasure. The Supper at Emmaus is an allusion to the spiritual food of the Eucharist, for the disciples at Emmaus only recognized Christ when he broke bread. Compositionally, too, the painting ties in with the 16th-century Flemish tradition of market and kitchen still lifes by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer, which was continued by Lucas Valckenborch, Frans Snijders and others. Another very similar composition is a painting of the same subject dated 1570 and attributed to Pieter Aertsen, which is in a private collection.² The scene of the Supper at Emmaus in the Amsterdam picture was borrowed directly from an engraving of 1603 by Jacob Matham.³

The display of fruit and vegetables in this painting recalls that in comparable works made by the Lombard artist Vincenzo Campi around 1580.⁴ The genre was introduced into the Netherlands by the Delft painter Pieter Cornelisz van Rijck, who returned from Italy in 1604.

When the painting was purchased in 1903, Hofstede de Groot had already associated it with the Monogrammist FVS, who had not yet been identified as Floris van Schooten. Although an attribution to him has been mooted repeatedly in the past few decades, the Rijksmuseum has maintained until now that the painting was by Floris van Dijck.⁵

Now that the oeuvres of Floris van Dijck and Floris van Schooten have been better defined it is possible to assign this painting to the latter with firm conviction. The difference in quality between the deftly painted still life and the rather clumsily executed figures is found in other paintings signed FVS. Three other kitchen pieces by him also contain the scene at Emmaus, and one of them has the FVS monogram and is dated 1620.⁶

Comparison with dated works by Floris van Schooten suggests that the likeliest date for this painting is c. 1630. The structure and fall of light recall a kitchen still life dated 1630 which is in a private collection,⁷ as well as a still life painted jointly with Pieter Claesz around 1630, the two halves of which are also privately owned.⁸

Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007

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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. 270.