Fruit and Wine Glass

Dated 1659 and held in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, this fruit and wine glass still life by Willem van Aelst belongs to the period immediately following his return from Italy and France to Amsterdam. The combination of fruit and a wine glass was a classic Dutch still life pairing that allowed the painter to demonstrate contrasting skills: the soft, organic surfaces of fruit against the hard transparency of glass. Wine glasses — often the tall, thin-stemmed roemer or the more delicate flûte — were technically demanding objects, requiring the painter to render an object that has no fixed colour of its own but takes on the colour of what is seen through it, behind it, or reflected in it. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, while primarily associated with Flemish painting, acquired important Dutch works through its long history of collecting.

Glass in Van Aelst's still lifes is painted with a combination of transparent washes for the body of the vessel, thin white strokes for the highlights on the rim and stem, and careful rendering of the distorted reflections visible in the curved glass surface. Fruit beside the glass is treated with the opposing strategy — opaque underpaint, coloured glazes, textural dry-brush — making the visual contrast between organic and manufactured objects immediate and striking.