Still-Life

De Heem's still-life paintings initially followed the style of the Haarlem school, but later drew closer to the more lavish Flemish style of large-scale still-lifes. Nevertheless, certain Dutch elements cannot be overlooked. In this painting, they are particularly evident at the points where a "dialectical principle" determines the compositional structure.

A mass of fruit and flowers ranging from ripe chestnuts to blackberries, from columbine to roses, has been arranged on a stone slab. A wide variety of surfaces, each with a different effect in light, with pure or iridescent colours, is spread out before us. Yet snails are already crawling across the vine leaves, the foliage is discoloured and withering and, the ears of grain are curling, the peach has burst its skin, the citrus fruit is half peeled, the white carnation is dried and drooping over the table edge.

At the very point where the image bears an iconographic message of the transience of worldly life in the form of nature's riches, we see these things in their last bloom of beauty. Just as a ruin could represent the picturesque appeal of architecture, so too can a vine leaf riddled with snails seem picturesque in the full and final flowering of its beauty.