Still Life with Landscape

Abraham Hendricksz van Beyeren

1650s

Oil on canvas

Dallas Museum of Art

Van Beyeren’s specialty was painting sumptuous banquet tables laden with silver and gold vessels, fancy glassware, fine fruit, and expensive table coverings of damask, satin, and velvet. Works of this kind gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his skill at describing the play of light on a variety of different surfaces and to organize luxurious objects into opulent compositions. Still-life painting was enormously popular in 17th–century Holland. Van Beyeren’s paintings stand apart from most, however, with their unusually loose and energetic brushwork. Van Beyeren’s specialty was painting sumptuous banquet tables laden with silver