Frans Hals Museum and De Hallen Haarlem
23 September
2017 to7 January2018
This unique exhibition featuring old and new art
showcases the magnificent food still lifes of the Golden Age. It offers an
alternative reading of these works as documents from an eventful history. What does the
foodwe see tell us about the Netherlands’colonial and trade relations in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
As quinoa and the avocado have changed European cooking over the
last few decades, so, from the fifteenth century onwards,‘new’ foodstuffs like
coffee, sugar and tomatoes transformed our ancestors’ eating habits.
From the
end of that century European imperialism changed the map of the world and
created a global trading network.The start of an emotionally charged exchange
between peoples and cultures, it sawt he import of new agricultural produce and foodstuffs
from Africa, America, East and Southeast Asia and India.Before this,Europeans
had no knowledge of tea, sugar, coffee, tomatoes, potatoes or maize.These new
and,at the time, exotic types of food changedthe European diet forever.
As the prime
movers of international trade,the Dutch saw their economy boom in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.The huge abundance of wealth gave rise to a self-assured
bourgeoisie that delighted in displaying its affluence. People had their
portraits painted and they also wanted landscapes and seductive still lifes on
their walls. It is no surprise that many of the new products feature in the
Golden Age still lifes.
The Still Life as a HistoricalDocument
A Global Table features
seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish stilllifes by artists such as Floris van
Dijck, Balthasar van der Ast, Clara Peeters, Jan de Heemand Willem Kalf.
The Old Master paintings are not the subject of traditional art-historical
analysis but rather ‘read’ as historical documents. The exhibition invites
viewers to ask three simple questions about the foods in the still lifes: What are
they? Where did they come from and how much did it cost–in terms of money and
human suffering –to get them here? In finding answers to these questions,the
paintings can be seen as documents charting the growthof economic powerand
colonial expansion of the Republic and the Dutch contribution to the creation of
the world economy.
Balthasar van der Ast
Still Life with Shells and Tulips,1620
Oil on Panel
Mauritshuis, The Hague
Jan Davidsz de Heem
Still Life with Moor and Parrot, 1641
Oil on Panel
Hotel de Ville (Broodhuis), Brussel
