Lot 15. Floris Claesz. van Dijck (Delft 1575 – 1651 Haarlem), A uitgestald or ‘display piece’ still life of fruit and olives in various blue and white chinese export porcelain bowls, a Siegburg stoneware schnabelkanne, a bekerschroef silver-gilt rummer mount containing a berkemeijer conical rummer, a roemer, an upturned façon-de-Venise beaker with lion mask prunts, a stemmed flute, old and young cheese upon a pewter plate, a knife and various scattered fruits and nuts, all arranged upon a white lace and damask cloth laid over a rose damask cloth covering a table, oil on oak panel, 74.7 x 114.5 cm. Lot sold: 2,092,000 GBP (Estimate: 600,000 - 800,000 GBP). © 2022 Sotheby's.

Property from the Grasset Collection.

Provenance: Fritz Wenté (1853–1935), Sinzig, Germany;
By whose Estate sold, Cologne, Lempertz, 28 May 1937, lot 68 (as Jan Davidsz. de Heem, signed with initials) for RM.4200;
Thence by descent to the son of the buyer at the above sale;
By whom sold anonymously ('The Property of a Gentleman'), London, Sotheby's, 6 December 1995, lot 58, for £290,000;
Where acquired for the Grasset collection.

Literature: F.G. Meijer, in Dawn of the Golden Age. Northern Netherlandish Art 1580 - 1620, exh. cat., Amsterdam 1993, pp. 604–5, under no. 276, n.2;
F.G. Meijer, Brueghel to Canaletto, European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection, exh. cat., San Diego 2016, p.11, no. 5, reproduced in colour;
T. Stanton, A Feast for the Eyes, European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection, exh. cat., Saint Petersburg, Florida 2019, pp. 66–67 and 99, no. 28, reproduced in colour.

Exhibited: San Diego, The San Diego Museum of Art, Brueghel to Canaletto, European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection, 2 April – 2 August 2016, no. 5;
San Diego, The San Diego Museum of Art, on loan 2016 - 2019 (when part of the Genre & Myth display 2017 – 2019);
Saint Petersburg, Florida, Museum of Fine Arts, A Feast for the Eyes, European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection, 23 March – 2 September 2019, no. 18.

Note: Floris van Dijck was one of the earliest and most influential of the native Dutch still-life painters, and although very little is known about his life and he left only a very small body of work, he enjoyed a considerable reputation in his own lifetime. He was arguably the most important pioneer in Haarlem of the uitgestald or ‘display piece’ still life, and his works in this vein – of which this is one of the largest and most impressive examples – are amongst the most famous and recognisable of all Dutch still-life paintings of the seventeenth century.

Van Dijck was born into a wealthy Haarlem brewing family and travelled briefly in Italy around 1600 before returning to Haarlem, where he married in 1606 and where he later joined the Guild of Painters in 1610. No more than a dozen works by his hand are known, with dates ranging from 1610 to 1628, and all are of consistently high quality and closely related in style and format.¹ Such a small œuvre suggests that Floris was either a painstaking and unhurried painter, or that his wealth meant that he did not need to paint for a living.

The present work is one of his four largest known paintings; it is of very similar dimensions to another uitgestald panel dated 1610 and measuring 73.7 x 113 cm., sold London, Sotheby’s, 8 December 2004, lot 16, and later with Galerie de Jonckheere in Paris (fig. 1).

Fig.1 Floris Claesz. van Dijck, An uitgestald still life of a laden tabletop, 1610. Oil on panel, 73.7 x 113 cm. Formerly Galerie de Jonckheere, Paris.

Two further panels, both ‘display piece’ still lifes, are of slightly larger size: that of 1615–16 last recorded with Otto Naumann in New York,² and the celebrated laden table still-life of around 1615–20 today in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig. 2).³ The last and largest of the group is the uitgestald still-life in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which is dated 1622 and measures 100 x 135 cm.⁴

Fig.2 Floris Claesz. van Dijck, Still life with cheese, fruit and a stoneware ewer on a laden table, ca. 1615-20. Oil on panel, 82.2 x 111.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Van Dijck’s still lifes did not significantly change over the course of his short career, and regardless of size they typically depict a well-laden table with a pile of cheeses surrounded by drink and other food in plain and precious vessels. There is remarkably little variation in their general composition: all the tables are covered with a rug (usually red in colour) over which is draped a fine white damask napkin edged with lace. In order to depict such a large number of objects, the tabletops are all seen from an elevated viewpoint. In the present work depth is achieved by placing the roundels of the plates and bowls in counterpoint to the verticals of the ewers and glasses, with diagonals provided by the tablecloths and the knife resting upon the pewter plate. Despite the great variety of objects depicted here and their varying shapes and textures, the quality of execution is of the highest order throughout, and a remarkable pictorial unity is achieved.

As Dr Fred G. Meijer has observed, the objects displayed in these still lifes mingle expensive and exotic imports with everyday local wares and goods. The centre of the composition here is, of course, dominated by the stack of cheeses of differing types and stages of maturity, such as the large aged cheese known as Oude Kaas at the bottom. These, the roemer and the pewter plates would have been commonplace items, but the five dishes and bowls of Chinese Wanli porcelain, for example, were at that time fragile and expensive luxury imports newly brought to the Netherlands by the Dutch East India Company. The orange, lemons, olives and grapes contained in them were also imported treats from southern Europe. The upturned façon-de-Venise glass beaker, probably made in nearby Liège or Antwerp, and the Berkemeyer rummer in its silver-gilt mount would also have been fashionable and valuable possessions. Equally expensive would have been the richly decorated late sixteenth-century stoneware ewer standing on the left, probably made by Christian Knütgen, and imported from Siegburg in the Rhineland. The demonstration of and delight in the opulence of this table and its contents is palpable, and by inference perhaps also the painter’s pride in the wealthy trading centre that was contemporary Haarlem.

On account of the rarity of signed and dated works, it is not easy to date the present painting precisely within Van Dijck’s œuvre. Although he took care not to repeat his objects identically, many of the elements in the present painting can be paralleled in other still lifes by his hand. Among the group of his signed and dated works, for example, the still life of 1613 today in the Frans Hals Museum contains a very similar arrangement of the old and new cheeses on a pewter plate upon which a knife rests (fig. 3).⁵ This arrangement appears again in very similar form in a smaller panel, present whereabouts unknown, which is signed and indistinctly dated 161(5?).⁶ Similarly, the halved apple upon a pewter plate projecting over the edge of the table in the foreground, the porcelain bowls containing olives and grapes, the Berkemeyer rummer in its silver-gilt mount and a similar German stoneware kanne (with a more elaborate finial) can all be found in the still life of much the same dimensions formerly with De Jonckheere in Paris, which is dated 1610 (fig. 1). The halved apple appears again together with the same stoneware ewer as here – this time turned to face the viewer – in the larger panel in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 2), which is generally dated to between 1615 and 1620, but by this time Van Dijck’s compositions were rather more open and the objects more brightly lit and placed at a greater distance from the spectator than those in the present panel. Taken together, these parallels might suggest that the present panel was painted in the first half of the same decade but probably not much later than 1615.

Fig.3  Floris Claesz. van Dijck, Still-Life with Fruit, Nuts and Cheese, 1613, oil on panel, 66.5 X 95 cm, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

Despite his short career and the small number of paintings he produced, Floris van Dijck exerted an enormous influence over the development of still-life painting in Haarlem, not only with his contemporary, the Fleming Nicolaes Gillis (1595–1632), who helped pioneer the introduction of the laden table still life as a genre, but also with artists of the next generation such as Floris van Schooten (1590–1655), who evidently shared his delight in decks of old and new cheeses, not to mention the great Pieter Claesz. (1597–1661).

Note on Provenance

Fritz Wenté was born in Aue/Wittgenstein on 15 July 1853 and was living in Brohl-am-Rhein when he married Clara Bornefeld in August 1886, and when he established a partnership, Gebrüder Wenté with his brother Julius in 1888. The family owned a paper mill in Brohl (upstream from Sinzig on the Rhine) from 1884 to 1919, leased by the brothers from their father, and Fritz also owned a brown coal mine. The partnership was dissolved in Sinzig in 1915. The brothers’ mother Auguste Wenté donated land for a Protestant church in Niederbreisig, between Sinzig and Brohl, where several family members are buried.

We are grateful to the Koordinierungsstelle für Provenienzforschung in Nordrhein-Westfalia.

¹ The majority of these panels are of much the same size, around 47 x 75 cm. Apart from those listed below, the remaining dated works are another of 1610 in a private collection; one of 1613 in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem; an indistinctly dated panel of 161(?) sold London, Sotheby’s, 15 December 2018, lot 120; and a panel of 1628, sold New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2016, lot 25. All of these are ‘display pieces’ of laden tables, with the exception of the last, whose subject of fruit suggests that Van Dijck may have altered his style in later life. It is also much the smallest in size (28 x 45 cm).

² Panel, 80.5 x 124 cm. Sale, Paris, Laurin, 25 March 1994, lot 12. The last digit of the date remains indistinct and has been read both as 1615 and 1616.

³ Inv. no. A4821. Panel, 82.2 x 111.2 cm. Meijer 1993, pp. 604–5, no. 276, reproduced in colour, pl. 248.

⁴ On loan from a private collection. Exhibited Atlanta, Georgia, High Museum of Art, Masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age, 1985, no. 22.

⁵ Inv. no. 79. Panel, 50 x 77 cm. See E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Holländische Stillebenmaler im. 17 Jahrhundert, Lingen 1995, vol. II, p. 292, no. 98/2, reproduced.

⁶ Panel, 49.7 x 77.1 cm. Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Sotheby’s, 14 December 2000, lot 25.

Sotheby's. Old Masters Evening Auction, London, 7 December 2022