Woman Selling Vegetables

In Rockox’s time, the kitchen chimney stood here. Together with the well, it was a seventeenth-century kitchen’s most important utility. A painting could often be hung on the chimney in the kitchen of a patrician house as a reference to the area’s function. A ‘Joachim Beuckelaer’ would certainly have been in its place here. The vegetable seller offers a wide selection of vegetables and fruit, and her companion deals in game. Duck with fruit was very much a favourite dish in patrician cuisine. Initially, Joachim Beuckelaer painted religious themes, later using the religious context to enhance the attraction of his market pieces and still lifes. Together with his uncle, the Amsterdam painter Pieter Aertsen (Amsterdam 1508–1575), he was an initiator of the independent market and still-life themes in painting. Their paintings were often also allegorical depictions.