Still-Life with Drinking-Horn

still-life

Exceptionally for a still-life specialist, the Rotterdam-born Kalf was praised by an Amsterdam poet as one of the city's leading painters. Perhaps the praise would not have been forthcoming had he persevered in his first interest: shabby peasant barn interiors and still-lifes of humble kitchen implements, painted during his stay in Paris from about 1640 to 1646. After his arrival in Amsterdam, however, following his marriage to a cultivated young woman of good family, Kalf began to paint the type of still-life for which he is best known.

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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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