Still Life with Pie and Silver Ewer

Dating to 1658, this canvas-format work featuring a pie and silver ewer is notable both as a relatively late Heda composition on canvas — he worked predominantly on panel throughout his career — and for its complicated institutional history, having at one point been held in the Führermuseum at Linz, the collection Adolf Hitler assembled from confiscated and purchased artworks during the Nazi period. The Führermuseum collection was a massive aggregation of European Old Masters assembled for a planned museum in Linz, Austria; after the war, many works were restituted to original owners or pre-war holders, while others entered post-war Austrian and German collections. This work's current status and location is therefore of potential significance to art restitution research. As a painting, the 1658 Heda brings together the silver ewer — a tall pouring vessel that allowed Heda to demonstrate his mastery of reflected imagery in curved metal surfaces — with the raised pastry pie whose warm ochre tones provided one of the few colour contrasts in his otherwise grey and silver palette.

Oil on canvas, the silver ewer is the most complex single object in this composition: its bulbous lower body reflects a wide range of surrounding colours in distorted form, while the narrow spout requires a different light treatment. The canvas support gives this late work a slightly softer surface texture than Heda's panel-based work, visible in the slightly more diffuse edges of cast shadows.