Here the oysters take a back seat to the untouched lobster. This is from the http://www.vangoghgallery.com/...It was while he was painting in The Hague, the happiest and most successful years of his career, that van Beyeren achieved that style for which he is best known today. The Hague, with its nearby fishing village of Scheveningen, favored those lavish displays of seafood, which exactly suited the dashing, almost impressionistic techniques of an artist who was unsurpassed in recreating the iridescent sheen of fish and other creatures of the sea. Van Beyeren's later work was concerned with sumptuous still lives of fine chinaware and choice foods set in warm translucent backgrounds. The modernism of his technique, with its use of bravura lighting, was not, however, always to the liking of a clientele of rich bourgeoisie, who regarded illusionist realism and linear exactitude as the supreme achievement in art.
