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KALF, Willem/ ARTISTS
1650-1899/ ART MAIN
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Dutch painter (b. 1622,
Rotterdam, d. 1693, Amsterdam)
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Dutch painter, one of the most celebrated of
all sill-life painters. In 1642-46 he worked in Paris. On his return to
the Netherlands he lived in Hoorn and then in 1653 settled in Amsterdam.
His early works were modest kitchen and courtyard scenes, but he soon
became the outstanding exponent of a type of still-life in which fruit
and precious objects – porcelain, oriental rugs, Venetian glass – are
arranged in grand Baroque displays. His pictures have often been
compared with those of Vermeer because of his masterly handling of
texture and his ability to manipulate warm and cool colours (he
frequently contrasts the reddish browns in a carpet with the yellow of a
peeled lemon and the blue and white of porcelain).
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Niederländische Malerei des 17…. – amazon.de
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La tulipomania : l’histoire d’une fleur… – amazon.fr
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Willem Kalf: 1619-1693 – amazon.uk
vietnamese
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Still-Life with Lemon, Oranges and Glass
of Wine
1663-64
Oil on canvas, 36,5 x 30,8 cm
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe
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The middle axis of this painting is formed
by a roemer wine glass with an elaborate handle. Placed in front of a
dark niche, it is partly lit by the small amount of light that shines on
it. The light is also refracted by the transparent glass and the wine
itself. On the marble table there are three bergamot or Seville oranges
and a lemon. Jutting out over the table’s edge, a knife with a polished
agate handle protrudes through the bright yellow lemon peel, and the
porous strip of skin, peeled off in one piece, curls around like a
festoon, forming a decorative counterpart to the narrow pointed orange
leaves. Showing sweet and sour citrus fruits together in this way, the
artist symbolically admonishes the viewer to be temperate and to add
lemon and orange juice to wine, as they were considered to have
medicinal, humoral and pathological properties.
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Still-Life with a Late Ming Ginger Jar
1669
Oil on canvas, 77 x 65,5 cm
Museum of Art, Indianapolis
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Still-life painting occasionally
registers the pride that contemporaries took in global trade and
colonial endeavour. Like the botanical gardens and finest collections,
still-lifes gathered disparate objects from all reaches of Dutch trade,
and brought them home, re-presenting them in European terms of science
and collecting, without specific concern about their origin. In this
painting of fine household items, Willem Kalf effortlessly combined
Venetian and Dutch glassware, a recently made Chinese jar for luxury
ginger, a Dutch silver dish, a Mediterranean peach, and a half-peeled
lemon, the object of citrus trade and of medicinal treatises. He
displayed them on an Indian floral carpet, in a dramatic spotlight that
invites contemplation and admiration, for the fine wares as well as the
artist’s recrafting of them. Kalf’s jewel technique evokes their value
and unifies them in an arrangement, that, however lifelike for each
individual object, is clearly pictorial.
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Still-life
1650s
Oil on canvas, 105 x 87,5 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
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This is a typical illustration of the type
of still-life of which Kalf was an outstanding specialist. The still-lifes
by Kalf look very different from those of his predecessors (like Pieter
Claesz. and Willem Heda). They are, in a sense, much more theatrical; in
their sonorous quality they bring to mind the landscapes of his
contemporary, Jacob van Ruisdael.
In the paintings by Head or Pieter Claesz.,
the objects are ordered in a simple way; they are just laid out on the
table. The light is even; shadows are used only to emphasize each
object’s plastic form. The still-life is generally set in a rather wide
space (the painting itself being oblong). In Kalf’s paintings, however,
the space is narrowed. The backgrounds is much darker; and in this
narrow space, against this background, the still-life seems curiously
isolated. A soft light picks out each different object, showing its
unique quality and colour, as spotlights focus on actors on a dark
stage. In the narrow space, the arrangement too is much tighter.
For this rich, glowing kind of still-life
the 17th century used an apt term, "pronkstilleven" (still-life
of ostentation); and part of the content of this term is certainly the
choice of objects itself. In Heda and Claesz. food and utensils appear
that belong to normal life: bread, beer, fish, plates and jugs of pewter
or ordinary glass. Kalf (and his contemporary Abraham van Beyeren too)
uses almost exclusively objects that are extraordinary: vessels of
silver and gold, chalices of china, lobster, tropical fruit, displayed
against rich Persian cloth.
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