Still life with a porcelain bowl with fruit and glasses on a round marble table

This 1660 canvas, now in the Groninger Museum, offers a focused version of Kalf's mature pronk formula: a porcelain bowl of fruit, glassware, all arranged on a round marble table that introduces an unusual architectural formality to the still-life setting. The marble table as a compositional device was less common than the draped cloth or bare wooden surface, and its use here suggests a deliberate appeal to a different register of domestic interior — the entrance hall or cabinet rather than the kitchen or dining table. The Groninger Museum holds this work as part of a collection that documents Dutch and northern Netherlandish culture across several centuries, providing a regional institutional context for a painter who was active in Amsterdam. The porcelain bowl — likely Chinese blue-and-white — is the compositional centrepiece, with fruit and glassware arranged around it in a carefully considered spatial grouping.

The marble table surface required Kalf to render the veined, polished stone with convincing translucency and pattern, a challenge requiring fine brush control and layered glazing. The reflections of the objects on the polished marble surface below them add a secondary image that complicates and enriches the composition. The round format of the table echoes the circular forms of the bowl and fruit, creating an internal geometric coherence.