Juan van der Hamen y León Madrid 1596 - 1631, Among the most celebrated artists at the Spanish court in early seventeenth-century Madrid, Van der Hamen was this new genre’s most important proponent, specializing in imaginative, balanced and keenly observed compositions.

A near contemporary of Velázquez, he was also an admirable portraitist and a painter of religious and allegorical subjects; yet despite his wide-ranging subject matter it is for his still lifes that he is best remembered today. In contrast to the stepped-plinth compositions that Van der Hamen developed from 1626, when his arrangements of such surfaces become increasingly complex, in the early 1620s he favoured a compositional type with a single ledge, as exe...