Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life

A tempting pyramid of exotic foods stands out against the dark background of Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s sensuous painting, evoking delectable flavours and scents. At the base, three fleshy oysters curled up in their shells are placed in a triangle echoing the pyramid form. A single, half-full glass of red wine makes the apex, the reflection of a window glittering on one side.

In seventeenth-century Holland these were costly luxuries, but de Heem surrounds them with more mundane things: blue bindweed and scaly ears of wheat twine and trail through the picture. The plant stems meet above the wineglass in a cluster. The whole pyramid seems to hang down in space from these knotted stems, but is anchored to the shelf by the two large fruits – the clementine orange and the lemon, both grown in the hothouse of a wealthy family’s estate. The lemon is partly peeled, ready to accompany the oysters and give a tingle to the tongue. A snail meanders along as if to look at itself in the gleaming skin of the cherry. The picture is painted on an oak panel, which allowed de Heem to work in great detail, with vivid, fresh colours and far more speed and fluidity than he could have done on canvas.

De Heem was one of the most successful still-life painters in the seventeenth century . He was prolific and innovative, perhaps particularly in his flower painting. He turned the stiff, almost two-dimensional arrangements of earlier artists like Balthasar van der Ast (who may have been his teacher) into fully rounded arrangements of flowers – compare van der Ast’s Flowers in a Vase with Shells and Insects with de Heem’s Flowers in a Glass Bottle on a Marble Plinth (private collection, on loan to the National Gallery). Later, de Heem’s style was taken to the ultimate in naturalistic flower painting by artists like Rachel Ruysch – see her Flowers in a Vase.

Yet de Heem retained one technique that seems to be common to almost all the seventeenth-century Dutch flower painters. The convolvulus is a spring flower, certainly not in bloom when either cherries or wheat are ripening. Although the picture looks real, it’s an imaginary composition painted from sketches and created to celebrate the abundance of nature, the passing of the seasons and the prosperity of the Dutch nation, where such luxuries were being brought in from abroad by merchant ships.

In some of his paintings, such as Vanitas Still-life (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), de Heem used direct symbolism – a skull as a reminder of the shortness of life, for instance – but it’s not necessarily present here. Perhaps it’s enough to savour the richness of colour, the textures and sensuality in this small, jewel-like painting – qualities that a seventeenth-century Dutch collector would also have enjoyed.