Saturday 31 May 2008

Painting food to feed the artist


In the same discipline, known in Dutch as the almost unpronounceable ontbijt (breakfast piece) was William Claesz Heda whose Still Life with Oysters is more aristocratic in taste and in ingredients, usually ham, mince-meat pie, and oysters. Making pies for some of these painters seems to have been as artistic an activity as the painting itself. To paint food and wine was perhaps secondary payment for the starving artist.