Still life with turrones
Juan van der Hamen y León , 1622
58 cm × 97 cm
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art , Cleveland
Still life with turrones is a painting by the Spanish painter Juan van der Hamen y León from 1622. The 58 cm × 97 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 Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland , Ohio .
Image description
Juan van der Hamen y León arranged the objects on a deep stone slab against a dark background, as was typical of many Spanish still lifes. He played with the alternation of cuboids and cubes. Two glass bowls are filled with turrones . The one on the left edge of the picture is on the stone slab, the one on the right edge of the picture is raised on a chipboard box in which the fruit jelly was kept. At the lower left end of the stone slab van der Hamen showed walnuts in various stages of opening. With this and with the very differentiated glass on the chip box and the glass bottle in the center of the picture, van der Hamen showed that he was able to represent different textures and to prove his artistic ability on the glass.
In the lower left corner of the picture on the stone the painting is signed “Ju o Vander Gamen / de Leon fa t , 1622”.
background
In the still life with turrones , Juan van der Hamen y León took up the sugar-refined food culture of the higher strata of society in Madrid. He took up this subject in various paintings from this period, for example in the still life with sweets and glassware from the same year. For the still life with turrones , Juan van der Hamen decided against arranging the objects parallel to the image and positioned them on different levels in order to make better use of the image space. With this he already anticipated his three-stage compositions of later years.
Provenance
The provenance of the painting is not fully known. It was in a private collection in Mexico City . From her it was consigned to Christie's auction house in New York City , where it was auctioned on January 11, 1979. The Newhouse Galleries gallery in New York was awarded the contract together with Eugene V. Thaw. Of these, the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland , Ohio acquired the still life with turrones with the John L. Severance Fund .
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 .