Page 1 / 1
The Dutch painter Jan Davidszon de Helm (1606 - 1683/84) led the genre of still life to a perfection never before attained. He was able to depict bouquets of flowers, food, wine goblets, crawling insects, rotting fruit, silver bowls and transparent glass with unparalleled liveliness and precision. Tulips, the world's first speculative project and the trigger of Europe's first great stock market crash, are among his motifs, as are simple loaves of bread, slain animals and musical instruments made of polished wood. The extreme discipline in execution results in an overwhelming richness of meaning in his works. Some compositions literally overflow, others combine relatively few elements with a simple, caravagge-style dark background, against which the splendour of red lobsters, floured grapes and flashing silver cups stands all the more impressively.
Raised as the son of the almost equally famous still life painter David de Heem, he studied with Balthasar van der Ast and Daniel Seghers and moved to Leiden at the age of twenty, later to Antwerp and Utrecht. He and Rembrandt may have met in Leiden, but this is not certain.
He gave his knowledge to his two sons Cornelis de Heem and Jan Janszoon de Heem who continued the tradition in The Hague and Antwerp. As with organ builders, craftsmen and even composers, it was nothing unusual for the workshop to be regarded as a kind of family business by the standards of the time; it was not individual authorship that was of decisive importance for the fame of a work complex, but the name of the workshop in which a painting had been made, since it stood for a certain quality achieved through secret methods and specific technical refinements. Similar to the unmatched vivid flesh tones from the workshop of an Peter Paul Rubens, it is no longer possible to reconstruct with certainty what is the secret of the extraordinary precision of Heem's still lifes; similar to Caravaggio's case, speculation exists that a camera obscura was used in conjunction with mirrors that projected a real-life arrangement similar to a modern beamer onto the prepared screen. This alone, however, cannot explain the astonishing closeness to life of the pictures; the magic of his works ultimately remains an untouchable secret.
The Dutch painter Jan Davidszon de Helm (1606 - 1683/84) led the genre of still life to a perfection never before attained. He was able to depict bouquets of flowers, food, wine goblets, crawling insects, rotting fruit, silver bowls and transparent glass with unparalleled liveliness and precision. Tulips, the world's first speculative project and the trigger of Europe's first great stock market crash, are among his motifs, as are simple loaves of bread, slain animals and musical instruments made of polished wood. The extreme discipline in execution results in an overwhelming richness of meaning in his works. Some compositions literally overflow, others combine relatively few elements with a simple, caravagge-style dark background, against which the splendour of red lobsters, floured grapes and flashing silver cups stands all the more impressively.
Raised as the son of the almost equally famous still life painter David de Heem, he studied with Balthasar van der Ast and Daniel Seghers and moved to Leiden at the age of twenty, later to Antwerp and Utrecht. He and Rembrandt may have met in Leiden, but this is not certain.
He gave his knowledge to his two sons Cornelis de Heem and Jan Janszoon de Heem who continued the tradition in The Hague and Antwerp. As with organ builders, craftsmen and even composers, it was nothing unusual for the workshop to be regarded as a kind of family business by the standards of the time; it was not individual authorship that was of decisive importance for the fame of a work complex, but the name of the workshop in which a painting had been made, since it stood for a certain quality achieved through secret methods and specific technical refinements. Similar to the unmatched vivid flesh tones from the workshop of an Peter Paul Rubens, it is no longer possible to reconstruct with certainty what is the secret of the extraordinary precision of Heem's still lifes; similar to Caravaggio's case, speculation exists that a camera obscura was used in conjunction with mirrors that projected a real-life arrangement similar to a modern beamer onto the prepared screen. This alone, however, cannot explain the astonishing closeness to life of the pictures; the magic of his works ultimately remains an untouchable secret.