Artistic playfulness

Artists didn’t only have an eye for the aesthetic or the allegorical. They also had the playful insight to use letter biscuits to spell out their names or initials. Or they engraved them onto knives. Clara Peeters appears in reflection in several items in her paintings. These works of art might have been painted by request, but the artist often found ways to include themselves in the story. It motivates the spectator of the painting to search for clues, making the art interactive.

Food features prominently in the still-life paintings of the 17th century; they give us a unique insight into material culture and, with regard to the history of food, the shapes and forms of luxurious sweets, biscuits, pretzels and breads. But it is not in the still-life paintings but in the genre paintings that we find out more about food customs and traditions and the politics surrounding those traditions.