Banquet Still Life with a Parrot, Dog and Monkey

Entry

There is no reason to doubt the attribution of this ambitious still life, which is signed and dated 1644. Painted for the most part with reserves with only a few small pentiments, it is one of Adriaen van Utrecht’s few extant pronk still lifes.

Chong and Kloek believe that Frans Snijders (1579-1657) was the main influence in the conception of this work.¹⁵ But Snijders does not seem to have developed his own speciality of the large still life into a fully blown pronk variation of it. Rather a two-way exchange between Van Utrecht and Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606-1684) seems to have been a likely course, beginning with the former’s 1636 Still Life with Precious Metalwork in Brussels.¹⁶ Segal¹⁷ has suggested that this picture influenced De Heem’s development of the pronk still life in his two paintings of 1640¹⁸ and 1642,¹⁹ and the latter, in particular, may have been in turn Van Utrecht’s point of departure in formulating the Rijksmuseum picture.²⁰ Apart from the shells in the right foreground and the distant landscape view, there are obvious points of contact between the two works, not only in detail but also in the composition as a whole. From the earlier painting (1640), Van Utrecht would have absorbed the position and angle of the pie and spoon on the table and the wine cooler in the bottom right foreground. The first element was a favourite of Haarlem artists such as Pieter Claesz (c. 1597/98-1660),²¹ and may have been introduced to Antwerp by De Heem.

In fact, Van Utrecht would have found the copper basin or wine cooler in Snijders’s work too, for it features fairly frequently in his larder still lifes, as for instance in the Mauritshuis picture of the early 1620s.²² Monkeys too had been introduced into such scenes early by Snijders (following an Antwerp tradition), as for instance, in the painting on the New York art market in 1962.²³

Chong and Kloek believe the lobster in the Van Utrecht is disproportionately large; this may have resulted from an influential formula established by Snijders. Whether he attached a symbolic meaning to such proportions as shown in the Carpentras picture, as Robels believes, is open to debate;²⁴ but even in Snijders’s Larder Still Life in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-379) the lobster is almost as long as the boar’s head above. They also comment on the ‘towering’ flute glass, but this too may have been an accepted formula, for such a glass is depicted by De Heem in his pronk still life of 1642. The same tendency is evident in the parrot stand, now taller than that in Van Utrecht’s Still life with Precious Metalwork of 1636, and dwarfing the modest stands popularized by Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625).²⁵

The musical instruments, placed in the bottom left as in the De Heem, are a violin, lute (placed face down as in the 1642 De Heem), guitar and flute, below which the mouthpiece of a wind instrument protrudes. The musical score has not been identified.²⁶

The monkey is an African guenon, whose pose Van Utrecht repeated on other occasions,²⁷ suggesting that he worked from the same template. In the right corner before the wine cooler is a dog, clipped lion-like, which Chong and Kloek correctly named a Maltese terrier.²⁸ Aldrovandi called this ancient and favourite breed of lapdog Canis Melitensis.²⁹ Also then known as a bichon maltais, it was popular (as elsewhere) in the Spanish Netherlands, and was depicted, for instance, by Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625) in his joint painting with Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) of The Garden of Eden (Mauritshuis), by David Teniers II (1610-1690) in his early Five Senses (Brussels) and Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678) in his Double Portrait of Govert van Surpele (?) and his Wife of circa 1636 (National Gallery, London).³⁰ Van Utrecht also depicted it in his 1647 pronk still life at Dresden.³¹

On the chair is an elaborately chased silver-gilt ewer and basin; the same two objects seen from different angles seem to appear in the foreground of Van Utrecht’s still life of 1636 in Brussels. No similar pieces have been identified, but they can be compared with the ewer and basin of 1559 in the British Museum, which was made in Antwerp.³² Beyond the sweetmeat pie is an ewer of a shell mounted in silver-gilt. The shell is probably a Pink Conch (Strombas gigas), one is prominently displayed in De Heem’s 1642 pronk still life.³³ The ewer, different from the usually favoured nautilus cup, is unusual, and may be compared with the Augsburg, late sixteenth-century, mounted shell ewer by Elias (d. 1572) or Cornelis (d. 1575) Grosz in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.³⁴ Beyond, by the ham on a plate is an embossed silver-gilt standing cup, a Nuremberg speciality since the early sixteenth century, which returned to fashion in the ‘neo-Gothic period’ from the end of the century until the 1630s.³⁵ One is prominently displayed in Clara Peeters’s still life of 1611 in the Prado.³⁶ The lobster rests on a klapmuts and the fraises du bois are in a bowl both probably of Kraak porcelain manufacture of the Emperor Wanli period or later.³⁷ The fruit depicted consists of plums, lemons, grapes, peaches, mulberries, cherries and red and white currants.

Brakensiek believes that in this pronk still life Van Utrecht makes allusion to the Five Senses: the parrot referring to sight and touch, the monkey to taste, the dog to smell end the musical instruments to hearing.³⁸

Gregory Martin, 2022