Lot 243: Juan van der Hamen y León Madrid 1596 - 1631 , Still life with Cardoon, Decanter of Wine, Apples and other fruit, a winter landscape beyond

signed lower right Ju an vanderHammen / de Leonfa t . 1623 , oil on canvas

measurements note 26 3/8 by 41 1/8 in.; 67 by 104.5 cm.

London, Royal Academy of Arts, The Golden Age of Spanish Painting , January 10-March 14, 1976, no. 29, p. 54, reproduced.

A. E. Pérez-Sánchez, La Nature Morte Espagnole du XVIIυe siècle à Goya, Fribourg 1987, pp. 38 and 40, reproduced. p. 38;
W. B. Jordan, Juan van der Hamen Y Léon and the Court of Madrid, 2005, pp. 101 - 102, reproduced p. 102, fig. 6.27.

Marqués de Casa Torres, Madrid, circa 1905;
Thence by descent in the same family until recently.

Juan van der Hamon y León, who was descended from nobility on both sides of his family and was a member of the Flemish Royal Guard of Archers (Archeros del Rey), was one of the most important painters in Spain in the early seventeenth century. Three years older than Velázquez, he was already well established when the younger artist came to Madrid in 1623. Although Van der Hamen was a portraitist and painter of religious scenes, he was and is primarily known for his still lifes. As in Italy and the north, still life painting developed as a separate genre in Spain in the 1590s. Although it clearly owed debts to Italian and Netherlandish painting, it had a character much its own, largely due to the powerful influence of Juan Sánchez Cardón. Sánchez Cardón?s compositions were deceptively simple: showing vegetables, fruit and game set on the ledge of a blank window or larder ? or sometimes suspended above it. He had a relatively small repertoire of objects that he combined and recombined in different order to create extremely powerful works. Van der Hamen apparently first came into contact with Sánchez Cardón?s work in 1619 when he was commissioned to provide a still life for the hunting palace of El Pardo; his was the sixth in a series of still lifes, the other five having been painted by Sánchez Cardón. This exposure to the older artist had a profound effect on Van der Hamen and he used many of the same motifs in his earliest compositions. A cardoon, a staple part of the Castillian diet in winter, occupies a place of prominence at the left center of the present work, and was probably based on a painting that Van der Hamen had made . "Like Sánchez Cardón, Van der Hamen produced his own study of this member of the thistle family, in which the plant?s arching, thorny, celery-like stalks, bear the marks of the harvester?s knife. The result is an aggressive and unforgettable form with a ribbed surface of white and blushing pink. The artist was wont to perch it near the edge of a stone niche, allowing the raking light to play upon its varied surface and to case irregular shadows that contribute to a lively definition of the space around it."υ1 We see the same cardoon in two paintings of 1622,υ2 also anchoring the left side of the composition, along with the hanging citron, and variations of a sliced orange, apples and projecting carrots. However, in the present work Van der Hamen has abandoned the austerity of the pantry shelf, and has set his composition on what is clearly a table top, adding a decanter of wine and some hanging apples. Most remarkable, however, is the opening up of the composition to include a view out the window into a winter landscape. The impetus for doing so was no doubt the inspiration of Frans Snyders, whose paintings Van der Hamen certainly would have known, but the effect was to expand the tightly controlled setting developed by Sánchez Cardón and open it out into a literally wider perspective.

1 W. B. Jordan, Op. cit., pp. 99-100.
2 In private collections in Mexico and elsewhere, see W. B. Jordan, Op. cit., pp. 101-02, figures 6.24 and 6.25.