The partial peeling of the orange (an exotic fruit in seventeenth-century Holland), the slicing of the melon and the opening of other fruits, and of the oyster shells, underlines the point that all this wealth is available for consumption, both on the surface and within.
In comparison with the first painting, this image does not speak very forcefully of decay, death, and the subject of vanitas. These elements are present, in the mottling of some of the fruit, the insects feeding on the sliced peach, the mouse that scampers among the food. It is present, too, in the lobster so prominently displayed near the front of the picture plane; a rich item of food, but also a living creature that is now dead - a point emphasized by its juxtaposition with the living mouse; "when one sees a living animal near a dead one," observes Nathaniel Wolloch, "one is reminded of the fact that the latter was also alive only a short time ago and was not originally a still object" (Wolloch, 721). Such reminders of mortality, however, unlike the prominent dropped petals and decaying fruit of the van der ast painting, tend to be lost amid the richness elsewhere in the canvas. As critics have commented with reference to another Beyeren banquet painting, such elements "may be considered more of an intellectual conceit than a sober warning against the desire for material things like the objects depicted or the painting itself" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, web site).
Still life paintings immediately present the onlooker with two layers of potential meaning: the decorative, and the symbolic, the...
Such paintings are both aesthetic exercises and symbolic systems involving what one scholar has called "the spiritual interpretation of material objects" and reflecting "the Dutch bent for emblems and moralizing literature" (Kahr, 190). It can be argued that they therefore constitute ideal objects for the application of Barthes's system of reading signs.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "The Rhetoric of the Image." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977.
Israel, Jonathan I. "Adjusting to Hard Times: Dutch Art during its Period of Crisis and Restructuring (c.1621-c.1645)." Art History 20:3 (1997): 449-476.
Kahr, Madlyn Millner. Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Icon Editions, 1993.
Leppert, Richard D. Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Still Life Painting in Northern Europe." Special Topics Page, Metropolitan Museum of Art web site: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nstl/hd_nstl.htm.
Wheelock, Arthur J. "Still Life: its Visual Appeal and Theoretical Status in the Seventeenth Century." Still Lifes from a Golden Age. Northern European Paintings from the Heinz Family Collection. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1987.
Wolloch, Nathaniel. "Dead Animals and the Beast-Machine: Seventeenth-century Netherlandish Paintings of Dead Animals, as Anti-Cartesian Statements." Art History 22:5 (1999): 705-727.
