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.
