Still Life

This painting is a conundrum. It was acquired by the Princeton University Art Museum at auction in 1954 as a work by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Juriaen van Streeck. The compositional type—a small panel in an upright format featuring a few exotic objects placed against a dark background—is very much like the work of Willem Kalf, among the greatest of the seventeenth-century Dutch still life painters and an important influence on his Amsterdam compatriot. However, the manner of execution is unlike Van Streeck’s signed and dated paintings; the candies with stray sugar particles and the strip of paper and the spoon on the lip of the roemer are not found in any other seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, and the ceramic dish may be Japanese from the late seventeenth or the early eighteenth century rather than the wan-li porcelain familiar from similar paintings. Expert opinion is divided as to when it might have been painted or whether it is even Dutch at all. Research continues.