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拍品专文
Painted by the rare and enigmatic artist David Rijckaert II, this painting exemplifies the most esteemed qualities of the first generation of Flemish still-life painters, with its incisive detailing of objects and carefully balanced composition. The chromatic palette, dramatically lit foreground and meticulous treatment of everyday objects in this picture follows a tradition established by Osias Beert I (c. 1580-late 1624), Georg Flegel (1566-1638) and Clara Peeters (?1589-1657), who shaped the vocabulary of early still-life painters, developing the genre that flourished in Antwerp, Haarlem and Frankfurt am Main at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Small cabinet pictures, such as the present painting, were intended for intimate study by discerning viewers familiar with their symbolism, and would have been displayed among collections of artefacts and naturalia, alongside other paintings, scientific instruments, ornate objects, and classical antiques.
This composition can be classified as an ontbijtje, or ‘breakfast still life’, representing both a display of gastronomic luxury and a symbol of religious ideas. In the seventeenth-century culinary culture of the aristocracy and patrician middle classes, banquets consisted of up to nine courses and always concluded with dessert. Sugar confectionery came to prominence at the turn of the seventeenth century, having previously been used only for pharmaceutical purposes, and marked a dramatic transformation in taste, quickly replacing honey as a sweetener. The religious undertones in this painting are emphasized by the sweets arranged in the form of a cross in the left foreground, while the water and wine allude to Christ’s first miracle at the Marriage at Cana, and the wine and bread are Eucharistic symbols of his blood and body.
As a display of luxury, Rijckaert includes two drinking vessels: a Berkemeier glass and a conically shaped one in a gold bekerschroef, or glass-holder, which transforms a simple glass into an elegant vessel by providing an intricately designed stem and base. Rijckaert paints the stoneware ewer with such precision that it can be identified as a ‘Schnabelkanne’, produced in the ceramics tradition of Siegburg, Germany, most probably by the potter Christian Knütgen, a member of the influential potter dynasty, between 1550 and 1600. The stylistic and decorative motifs can be closely matched to comparable objects by the maker in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 1; inv. no. 11.93.3) and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (inv. no. 8457-1863), which are distinctive in their applied molded reliefs and incised ‘kerbschnitt’ chip-carved geometric decoration. The ornate, curvilinear designs typically had allegorical or religious significance and could depict entire narratives, usually made after prints of the nominal ‘Little Masters’ of the German school, such as Virgil Solis, Bartel Beham, and Theodore de Bry. The industry of German stoneware played an important part in the material culture of early modern Low Countries, catering to the life of Netherlandish middle classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The scarcity of Rijckaert's work can be attributed to historical confusion surrounding his identity. Rijckaert's name was borne by three successive members of an extended family of painters, all registered in the De Liggeren of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke. His father, David Rijckaert (1560-1607), was a brewer and ‘stoffeerder’—a decorator of wooden statues—and his son, David Rijckaert III (1612-1661), trained as a painter specializing in landscape and genre scenes. It was only after 1995, when a large decorative still life of shells, glassware and ceramics—signed and dated ‘DAVIDT.RYCKAERTS. / .1616.’—was sold, that new information came to light regarding Rijckaert's unique artistic identity (see Christie's, London, 8 December 1995, lot 38A). Dr. Fred G. Meijer deemed that painting far too early to be by David Rijckaert III, concluding that it was painted by David Rijckaert II (F.G. Meijer, ‘Herkend: Een stilleven van David Rijckaert II’, Magazine Rijksmuseum Twenthe, 2009, no. 1, pp. 26-28), from which an oeuvre could thus be reasonably established. Since the 1995 sale, Dr. Meijer has identified some 15 paintings as part of Rijckaert II's oeuvre, including a pair of still lifes featuring elegant glassware, shells and porcelain (sold Christie's, Paris, 16 October 2013, lots 82 and 83), a Still life with a lemon and capon (Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, inv. no. 0272), and the present picture.
This composition can be classified as an ontbijtje, or ‘breakfast still life’, representing both a display of gastronomic luxury and a symbol of religious ideas. In the seventeenth-century culinary culture of the aristocracy and patrician middle classes, banquets consisted of up to nine courses and always concluded with dessert. Sugar confectionery came to prominence at the turn of the seventeenth century, having previously been used only for pharmaceutical purposes, and marked a dramatic transformation in taste, quickly replacing honey as a sweetener. The religious undertones in this painting are emphasized by the sweets arranged in the form of a cross in the left foreground, while the water and wine allude to Christ’s first miracle at the Marriage at Cana, and the wine and bread are Eucharistic symbols of his blood and body.
As a display of luxury, Rijckaert includes two drinking vessels: a Berkemeier glass and a conically shaped one in a gold bekerschroef, or glass-holder, which transforms a simple glass into an elegant vessel by providing an intricately designed stem and base. Rijckaert paints the stoneware ewer with such precision that it can be identified as a ‘Schnabelkanne’, produced in the ceramics tradition of Siegburg, Germany, most probably by the potter Christian Knütgen, a member of the influential potter dynasty, between 1550 and 1600. The stylistic and decorative motifs can be closely matched to comparable objects by the maker in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 1; inv. no. 11.93.3) and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (inv. no. 8457-1863), which are distinctive in their applied molded reliefs and incised ‘kerbschnitt’ chip-carved geometric decoration. The ornate, curvilinear designs typically had allegorical or religious significance and could depict entire narratives, usually made after prints of the nominal ‘Little Masters’ of the German school, such as Virgil Solis, Bartel Beham, and Theodore de Bry. The industry of German stoneware played an important part in the material culture of early modern Low Countries, catering to the life of Netherlandish middle classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The scarcity of Rijckaert's work can be attributed to historical confusion surrounding his identity. Rijckaert's name was borne by three successive members of an extended family of painters, all registered in the De Liggeren of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke. His father, David Rijckaert (1560-1607), was a brewer and ‘stoffeerder’—a decorator of wooden statues—and his son, David Rijckaert III (1612-1661), trained as a painter specializing in landscape and genre scenes. It was only after 1995, when a large decorative still life of shells, glassware and ceramics—signed and dated ‘DAVIDT.RYCKAERTS. / .1616.’—was sold, that new information came to light regarding Rijckaert's unique artistic identity (see Christie's, London, 8 December 1995, lot 38A). Dr. Fred G. Meijer deemed that painting far too early to be by David Rijckaert III, concluding that it was painted by David Rijckaert II (F.G. Meijer, ‘Herkend: Een stilleven van David Rijckaert II’, Magazine Rijksmuseum Twenthe, 2009, no. 1, pp. 26-28), from which an oeuvre could thus be reasonably established. Since the 1995 sale, Dr. Meijer has identified some 15 paintings as part of Rijckaert II's oeuvre, including a pair of still lifes featuring elegant glassware, shells and porcelain (sold Christie's, Paris, 16 October 2013, lots 82 and 83), a Still life with a lemon and capon (Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, inv. no. 0272), and the present picture.