Still Life with Ham

A cut clove-studded baked ham with its skin stripped back, dominates this painting. You can feel disgust or attraction to this somewhat macabre display of flesh and death, while at the same time admiring the formidable technical ability of the artist who painted it. The objects are so realistically depicted that you feel invited to take a seat.
The painting is typical of Claesz’ earlier works in the mid-1620s. It is a masterful composition with strong contrasts between the white tablecloth and the pitch-black background, reconciled in the middle by the pinkish-red ham. The straw and smoked herring strewn horizontally across the table create a sense of depth and compositional balance. In this work, Claesz’s ambition appears to have been to explore the form, colour and texture of the different composition elements. One can clearly sense the distinctiveness of the fatty ham, the shiny herring, the warm coals, the matte tin and crusty bread. Claesz often recycled elements from his previous works. The little mustard jar can be found in several of his works, including his still life paintings in the David Collection, Copenhagen and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
As was customary in the Baroque period, the painting contains several symbols which relate to the ephemeral nature of life, the so-called vanitas symbols. The seemingly arbitrary placement of food on the table leaves the spectator with an impression of a scene where someone has just recently walked away from their meal. Claesz thus manages to incorporate a sort of temporality into a static painting. At the same time, the slowly dying embers in the backdrop constitute a subtle yet unmistakable symbol of the transience of life. Both elements represent the passage of time, something which painters of that era felt was crucial to incorporate into their works.