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Baroque and Rococo
Willem Kalf
Willem Kalf
(b Rotterdam, 1619; d Amsterdam, 31 July 1693).
Dutch painter, art dealer and appraiser. He was thought for a long time to have been born in 1622, but H. E. van Gelder’s important archival research established the artist’s correct place and date of birth. Kalf came from a prosperous patrician family in Rotterdam, where his father, a cloth merchant, also held municipal posts. In the late 1630s he travelled to Paris and spent a long time in the circle of Flemish artists in St Germain-des-Prés, Paris. In Paris he painted mostly small-scale rustic interiors and still-lifes. Kalf’s rustic interiors are dominated by accumulations of buckets, pots and pans and vegetables, which he arranged as a still-life in the foreground (e.g. Kitchen Still-life, Dresden, Gemäldegal. Alte Meister). Figures usually appeared only in the obscurity of the background. Though painted in Paris, these pictures belong to a pictorial tradition practised primarily in Flanders in the first half of the 17th century by such artists as David Teniers. The only indications of their French origin are a few objects that Flemish exponents of the same genre would not have incorporated into their works. Kalf’s rustic interiors had a major influence on French art in the circle of the Le Nain brothers. The semi-monochrome still-lifes Kalf produced in Paris form a link with the banketjes or ‘little banquet pieces’ painted by the Dutch artists Pieter Claesz., Willem Claesz. Heda and others in the 1630s. During the course of the 1640s Kalf developed the banketje into a new form of sumptuous and ornate still-life (pronkstilleven), depicting rich accumulations of gold and silver vessels. Like most still-lifes of this period, these were usually vanitas allegories.
Bodegon con aguamanil, frutas, copa nautilo y otros
objetos
Still-Life
1650s
Oil on canvas, 105 x 87,5 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
