Still-Life with a Nautilus Cup (detail)

still-life

Kalf depicted decorative objects - such as Chinese porcelain soup tureens, preciously decorated nautilus goblets and costly carpets - his paintings seem to have been dominated not so much by wealth and prosperity as by the aesthetic values and optical qualities of perception that emanated from these objects. Thus, the refraction of the light on the objects and the modification of the colours as mirrored by each of the other objects become the real subject of his art. Kalf achieved his effects by giving objects a bright luminescence, further emphasized by a dark background a method which made him a remote kinsman of the Caravaggists.

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About the Artist

Willem Kalf

1619 – 1693

Dutch painter, one of the most celebrated of all sill-life painters. In 1642-46 he worked in Paris. On his return to the Netherlands he lived in Hoorn and then in 1653 settled in Amsterdam. His early works were modest kitchen and courtyard scenes, but he soon became the outstanding exponent of a type of still-life in which fruit and precious objects - porcelain, oriental rugs, Venetian glass - are arranged in grand Baroque displays. His pictures have often been compared with those of Vermeer because of his masterly handling of texture and his ability to manipulate warm and cool colours (he frequently contrasts the reddish browns in a carpet with the yellow of a peeled lemon and the blue and white of porcelain).

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