Still Life with Golden Goblet

Pieter de Ring (? c. 1615 - Leiden 1660)

Daniel de Ring and Magdalena van den Hoecke, Pieter de Ring’s parents, came from Ypres and settled in Leiden. It is now known when or where their son was born. His date of birth is generally placed around 1615, but there are no extant documents to confirm this, and it cannot be ruled out that he was born ten years earlier or later. An interesting but undoubtedly romanticized view on the start of his career is given in an eighteenth-century manuscript that the Leiden artist and numismatist Frans van Mieris copied down from the notes of the musicologist Jan Alensoon, De Ring’s grandfather. In it the latter relates that Pieter worked as his head mason and admired the paintings that hung in the side room of his house so much that at night he took to drawing them. Alensoon then decided to apprentice him to Jan Davidsz de Heem. If there is a kernel of truth in this story the events most likely took place long before 1636, when De Heem moved to Antwerp. In any case, De Ring was active as an independent artist by 1648, the year in which he is recorded as one of the founding members of the Guild of St Luke in Leiden. He paid his annual dues again in 1649, but his name then disappears from its register. In 1657 he travelled to Ypres in order to divide the inheritance from his father and sister with his uncle, the painter Jan van den Hoecke. De Ring died in 1660 in Leiden,³ and was buried in the city’s Pieterskerk.

De Ring specialized in heavily laden tables with various kinds of fruit and luxury articles. His works from the 1650s, a dozen of which are dated, are clearly inspired by the sumptuous still lifes of De Heem and are executed with almost as much virtuosity. In a few of his paintings from the 1640s, however, the latter’s influence is strikingly absent. For instance, his earliest known picture of a ham and a flute glass from 1647 is closer to the monochrome work of the Haarlem School than to De Heem’s exuberant creations.⁴ Further evidence of a Haarlem connection is provided by a laid table that was probably begun by Willem Claesz Heda around 1647, to which De Ring later added fruit and other details.⁵ The artist produced his last dated painting in 1660, the year of his death. It is a huge sumptuous still life and is fully in the style of De Heem.⁶

It is not known whether De Ring had pupils, but he certainly had followers among the still-life painters of Leiden who were active in the 1650s and ’60s, including Nicolaes van Gelder, Harmen Loeding, and possibly Johannes Hannot.

Erlend de Groot, 2024

References
J. Dirks, ‘Penningkundig repertorium’, De Navorscher 32 (1882), p. 25; Bredius in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], V, Rotterdam 1882-83, p. 200; E.W. Moes, ‘Pieter de Ring’, Oud Holland 6 (1888), pp. 175-81; Gerson in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXVIII, Leipzig 1934, pp. 367-68; T. Tucker Kinder, ‘Pieter de Ring: A Still-Life Painter in Seventeenth-Century Holland’, Indiana University Art Museum Bulletin 2 (1979), pp. 26-43; S. Segal (ed.), Jan Davidsz de Heem en zijn kring, exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum)/Braunschweig (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) 1991, p. 44; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, p. 373; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, p. 169; Wegener in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XCIX, Munich/Leipzig 2018, p. 10