Artwork
Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables, with Christ at Emmaus in the background
Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables, with Christ at Emmaus in the background is an unspecified painting by the Dutch Golden Age artist Floris van Schooten. It dates from 1630 and is held in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.
About this work
Overview
This painting presents a crowded kitchen table laden with produce—carrots, artichokes, cherries, grapes, and numerous other vegetables and fruits arranged in baskets. Two kitchen maids attend to their work in the foreground. Behind them, drawn curtains reveal a secondary scene: the biblical episode of Christ at Emmaus, where the resurrected Jesus reveals himself to two disciples at a meal.
Subject & Meaning
The Emmaus story itself involves recognition through breaking bread, resonating with the painting's preoccupation with food and sustenance.
The composition juxtaposes humble domestic labor with sacred narrative. The kitchen maids and their abundant provisions occupy the viewer's immediate attention, while the religious episode recedes into depth. This hierarchy suggests spiritual significance embedded within ordinary activity rather than separate from it. The Emmaus story itself involves recognition through breaking bread, resonating with the painting's preoccupation with food and sustenance.
Technique & Style
The work belongs to a tradition of Flemish or Dutch still life that delights in precise description of surfaces and textures—waxy grapes, bristling artichoke leaves, smooth root vegetables. Spatial depth is achieved through the theatrical device of parted curtains, a metafictional gesture that frames the biblical scene as a performance within the larger scene. The scale of the still life elements relative to the background narrative inverts typical religious painting conventions.
Artist & collection
Artist
Floris Gerritsz van Schooten or Floris van Schooten (between 1585 and 1588 – buried 14 November 1656) was a Dutch painter who practised in a broad range of still life genres including breakfast pieces, fruit pieces, market scenes and large…
Stall with Fruit and Vegetables
Still life of laid table with cheese
Kitchen utensils, meat and vegetables
Kitchen Scene
Still life with berries
Young woman peeling a pear at a table with various fruits, an old man with a money bag adressing her
Still life of a laid table with cheese, meat and bread
Still Life, a Breakfast Piece
Fruit and Vegetable Market with a Young Fruit Seller
Kitchen Scene, with Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary in the background
Still life with fruit, vegetables and joint of veal
Früchtemarkt (Sommer)
The Fat Kitchen. An Allegory
Market Woman at the Vegetable Stall
Market scene with fruit and vegetables, and an amorous couple
Still life with fruit and oysters
Greengrocery Stall