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| Willem Claesz. Heda Breakfast with a Crab, 1648 oil on canvas 118 x 118 cm The State Hermitage Museum |
Heda, a Haarlem native, specialized in this type of painting during the second half of the 17th century, an era that has come to be known as the Golden Age of Dutch still life paintings.
Ontbijt, pronounced "onge-bite," even today appears frequently on cafe menus throughout The Netherlands as a way of describing a breakfast meal.
Indeed a couple days ago I ordered an ontbijt at the Barista Cafe on Grote Houtstraat in Haarlem. It included an omelette with cheese and tomato plus two slices of bread, washed down with a double latte, American style.
Heda's ontbijt painting contains a careful study of several objects used by the Dutch merchant class in the 17th century.
These include, on the right, a roemer, or rounded beer glass with bumpy knobs near its base. Apparently glass blowers placed the knobs near the bottom to keep the glass from slipping out of greasy hands.
Near the center of the composition sits a silver pot, which may have been used for tea but may also represent an early example of the chocolate pot. The finial on top of its lid is the best piece of evidence to support the latter theory, although the date of the painting argues against it as a representation of the chocolate pot, since the earliest references to drinking chocolate do not appear in Europe for another 15 years.
The tall flute glass near the center would be used for beer, another beverage which was undergoing tremendous change.
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| alewife woodcut, n.d. |
Before the 17th century, beer was brewed mostly by women. Known as alewives, these women would brew and bake in the home with the grains harvested from the fields.
Brewing, and then selling the beer out of the home, provided women with a measure of independence and personal sovereignty. It could be said that there was agency in the economics.
Unfortunately, with increasingly globalized trade connections in the 17th century between Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, new pressures came to bear on the alewives. Specialized artisans in Haarlem, Delft and Gouda began brewing commercially for export. Essentially men took over the beer brewing industry when it began to promise mercantile opportunities in a capitalistic system.
Leaving aside the beer to return to the glass from which it was drunk, the viewer of Heda's still life should recognize that although the flute glass originated in Holland, the shape is modeled after the Venetian design known as Façon de Venise. Its use in Haarlem is another example of the marketplace of skills and ideas prevalent during Holland's Golden Age.
On the left side of the table, a half peeled lemon dangles over the edge. This -- along with the crab, olives and bread -- suggests the image is a vanitas. The vanitas painting is something akin to a visual morality tale. Its primary intent is to remind the wealthy that their riches are transient.
A peeled lemon loses its freshness. The cooked crab quickly goes bad. The message, then, is to enjoy these items but to not take them for granted. Nothing lasts forever. Thus pleasure, and the wealth that brings it, are fleeting.
The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento possesses a similar vanitas by Heda. Although undated, the Crocker suggests it is an early example of Heda's work, dating to about 1631.
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| Willem Claesz. Heda (1594-1680) Still Life, n.d. (c. 1631) Oil on panel Crocker Art Museum |
Clearly Heda was working out the technique, although this Crocker vanitas has a stilted and clunky feel to it in comparison with the later Hermitage image. Yes, the white table carpet and flute glass appear in both images. And, yes, the background is similarly plain in both.
But the dramatic use of light and dark in the Hermitage is missing here in the Crocker, and the objects in this earlier composition fail to achieve the balance Heda wrought later in life.
For example, in the Hermitage image the table carpet hangs down below the table while the flute glass pierces upwards above the silver pot to form an apex. This gives the composition depth and dimension, a believable structure which is missing in the Crocker. The only hint of compositional order in the Crocker comes from the implied triangle of light above the objects.
The key dangling from a blue sash and the open-faced watch in the silver tray in the Crocker act to remind the viewer of the passage of time, similar to the peeled lemon in the Hermitage image, but the blue color fails to pop against the dark folds of the table carpet, thus lessening the meaning of the symbols and diluting the impact of the whole image.
Therefore, while the details in the Crocker image are masterful -- for example, the inlaid abalone on the knife handle and the reflections in the silver-- it is clearly the work of an artist not yet in his prime.
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