Still Life with Nautilus Cup

Willem Kalf was one of the most celebrated, sought after, and successful still-life painters of the seventeenth century. Despite the lack of documentary evidence that he operated a workshop with assistants, the existence of multiple replicas by less adroit hands indicates that Kalf did employ assistants during his years in Amsterdam. This Still Life with Nautilus Cup must be one of those workshop replicas. (Kalf’s original is lost.) The lesser quality of the painting is most evident in the lack of definition of the lemon rind and the relatively coarse rendering of the tapestry.The nautilus cup, a polished turban shell mounted on an elaborately wrought, gilded-silver base in the form of a putto holding a horn of plenty, appears in a number of Kalf’s still lifes of the late 1660s. The turban shell, with its mother-of-pearl luminosity and symbolic association with a cornucopia, made it a particularly appropriate focal point for Kalf’s images of wealth and prosperity. The blue-and-white Wan-Li porcelain bowl with lid is decorated with colored figures representing the eight immortals of Taoist belief.