Still Life with Landscape

Painting sumptuous banquet tables laden with silver and gold vessels, fancy glassware, fine fruit, and expensive table coverings of damask, satin, and velvet was a specialty of Abraham van Beyeren. 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, in his unusually loose and energetic brushwork.