 This lecture is entitled Willem Klez Hedde and the Dutch Broke Still Life, or Luxury Without Opulence, the Anti-Pronk. Now Hedde was one of the most popular still life painters in the Dutch Republic from around the middle of the 17th century and a little bit before and he was really representative of the general taste in still life painting in the Dutch Baroque. So he's a really excellent example and we're gonna take a look at some one particular painting of his. We're gonna take a closer look at this painting on the top but here at the bottom is another example of his still lifes and the top painting is this is called Still Life and it dates from the 1630s and the bottom painting dates from the 1640s. Now before we move on and take a close look at his still life I want to take this opportunity to review, right? I call this Luxury Without Opulence the Anti-Pronk and hopefully that's ringing some bells. Now what is a prank? Well this painting on the right is a good example of a prank still life and you might recall that this painting is a still life by the artist Jan de Heem. Jan de Heem. And Jan de Heem painted this painting in the mid 17th century and it's an excellent example of a prank still life and prank simply means hopefully remember ostentatious, ostentatious. And I think you can see this is an ostentatious still life, right? Remember we had the luxury items, imports, often items that people might never have seen in their whole life like this exotic bird. So you have fancy import items, you have beautiful luxury glass and silverware and it's all assembled in a very ostentatious almost chaotic way, a very dramatic way. We have this curtain up at the top and it's even set in almost this fantasy landscape. Remember we've got this wall suggesting ruins and this fantasy landscape in the background. Now we're going to take a look at Heda in a second and you'll see he uses some of the same objects, some of the same objects that suggest wealth and luxury, but he doesn't depict them with the same opulence and over the top display. So let's take a closer look at that top image here from the 1630s. Okay, so here's a larger image of that still life. And when you get a view of this up close like this, you can really see the wonderful attention to detail. And I think one of the first things you might notice having just looked at the prank still life, one of the striking things about this painting is it's much more monochromatic. Monochrome. The primary color in this painting is really sort of a tan or a brown color in almost all of the items in this painting, the back wall, the table cloth, even the silver has kind of a brown tinge to it. The only real bit of color is the lemon right in the center here. And interestingly, like I said before, we have some of the same objects that we saw in the prank still life. Silverware, glassware, we had appealing, appealed lemon, oysters, all of this in the prank still life that was that ostentatious over the top painting. But this painting shows a great deal more restraint, restraint. And what do I mean by restraint? Well, we have for one thing, not nearly as many objects being displayed as we saw before. We have a smaller scale. We have a more modest setting. Maybe it's a little hard to tell what the setting is, right? It's just against this blank wall. But you get a little suggestion. If you look at this glass or this goblet, there's a reflection of a window pane, which is a wonderful detail. But the reflection of the window pane does tell you this is in some sort of room. So we have a sense of a real setting that we could perhaps imagine ourselves in. This is possibly a home, a room inside of a home. And that knowledge almost provides this with a kind of narrative. And that coupled with the fact that there's a much more modest setting here almost makes it seem like this is a place setting at a table. You can imagine a narrative of someone having been enjoying a meal at this place setting and they're not there anymore. Someone has come enjoyed this meal and left. And many people view that sort of narrative of someone having been there and not being there anymore as a vanitas. This makes this a vanitas image. And again, this should be something you're familiar with now because we talked about this before. What is a vanitas image? It's a reminder of human transience, the inevitability of death. And you might think, well, that's sort of weird. I mean, this is just some food items. But in subtle ways, it does evoke mortality. And I'm just gonna scroll down and show you this compared to another image to hopefully hit home the point. Let's get this down there. Okay, now the image on the right, hopefully is familiar to you. That's Jacob van Roy Stiles, the Jewish cemetery. And we discussed this as a vanitas landscape. Vanitas landscape. And there were just certain details within the painting. I think the most obvious, of course, was the fact that it's a cemetery, which obviously is a much more something that hits you over the head more with these messages of death. But you see some similar things in these two paintings. We have this church in ruins, and we have things in ruins on this tabletop. This glass right here is broken, for example. And even the fact that this lemon is halfway peeled and cut open. It's not in its pristine whole form anymore. Even if you look over here, there's walnut shells so a nut has been broken into. We have oysters that are open on the tray. All of these things will perish just as human beings will inevitably perish. And just as we had the stormy landscape in Jacob van Roy style, we have kind of a bit of chaos and disorder with this overturned silverware, the broken glass again. So some of the same very subtle devices at work to suggest something much more meaningful than just an array of food items. Really, these items convey a much deeper meaning. And I think it shows how the Dutch could suffuse a lot of meaning and importance into something that at first glance really isn't all that significant. And again, I think this really shows how diverse and meaningful still lifes really are.