Boxes and jar with sweets
Juan van der Hamen y León , 1621
37.5 cm × 49 cm
Oil on canvas
Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada , Granada
Boxes and jars with sweets is a 1621 painting by the Spanish painter Juan van der Hamen y León . The 37.5 cm × 49 cm still life ,paintedin oil on canvas, shows the sugar-refined food culture of the higher classes. It thus belongs to a larger group of works among Juan van der Hamen's early still lifes. The painting belongs to the collection of the Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada in Granada .
Image description
The painting Boxes and jars with sweets shows storage containers for sweets on a stone slab against a dark background. The left half of the picture shows two chip boxes in which marzipan was kept, on which there is a glass with pickled cherries. The left half of the picture shows a silver spoon pointing to a terracotta honey pot . The shapes are simple, but at the same time powerfully modeled by the light, and show the respective material structure.
background
Like others in the early work of Juan van der Hamen y León, this still life is about the food culture at court and in the higher society of Madrid with its sugar-refined dishes. It differs from these, however, in that instead of the food itself, only its containers are shown. The picture boxes and jars with sweets as a whole stands out from the still life production of the early 17th century in Spain, which mostly did not even show food in its processed state.
Provenance
The provenance of the still life boxes and jars with sweets is unclear. It appears to have belonged to the royal collection around 1700 and to have hung in the Palacio del Buen Retiro together with its counterpart plate with ham, bread and wine glass , which is now in the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels . It is not known how it got to Andalusia from the collection. The painting was discovered in the Palacio Arzobispal in Granada. In 1946 it was bought by the city government and since 1958 it has been exhibited in the Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada .
literature
- William B. Jordan : Juan van der Hamen y León & The Court of Madrid . Yale University Press, New Haven 2005. ISBN 0-300-11318-8 .
- Felix Scheffler: The Spanish still life of the 17th century: theory, genesis and development of a new pictorial genre . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2000. ISBN 9783893545155 .