The feast laid out is lavish, but the table is so overladen, there is no space to dine. This is the somewhat absurd scenario staged by the tablescapes of Dutch banquet still life paintings. Also known as pronkstilleven, or “sumptuous still lifes”, these scenes are a distinct subgenre of still life painting that gained fleeting popularity in the mid-seventeenth century. Mountainous jumbles of sensuous luxury commodities — luscious fruits; savory meats and seafood; ostentatious servingware of gold, silver, and porcelain; and exotic imported textiles — simultaneously mound upward and tumble toward the spectator. The tabletops in these scenes do not support static display but rather facilitate an aggressive spilling forth. As if to drive the point home, the efflux of pie filling in Adriaen van Utrecht’s canvas serves as a visual metonym for the overall scene in which an array of fragrant, piquant treats is about to breach the boundary of the picture plane.

The banquet still life is a juiced-up version of a well-known genre: those painted vistas of tables laid with foodstuffs, some pieces of servingware, and perhaps a cloth or two. Iterations of this pictorial type encompass ancient Roman wall paintings, Caravaggio’s famous trompe l’oeil fruit basket, and the modernist canvases of Cézanne and Picasso. Typically, as in the examples just listed, there is a pared-down aspect to these arrangements that imbue them with incidental elegance — the fetching arrangement just happens to be there. Banquet still lifes, by contrast, multiply these components to present spectators with saturated visions of abundance and affluence — a phenomenon that held particular social meaning in the Dutch Republic at the moment of these pictures’ heyday.

The United Provinces of the Dutch Republic constituted the mightiest mercantile powerhouse in Europe during much of the seventeenth century. Massive personal fortunes as well as a flush bourgeoisie were, as Julie Berger Hochstrasser notes, built on what we now understand to be fundamental inputs of capitalism: rapacious extraction and privatization of natural resources; exploitation of waged labor and hyper-exploitation of unwaged labor; colonial theft; the production of profit through circulation of goods; and, critically, the mystification of these very dealings through their ellison from public view. In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx noted that the open realm of the marketplace, where purchase-ready commodities appear, stands in direct contrast to the “hidden abode” of production sites where exploitation occurs. In his tome, The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama describes the streets of seventeenth-century Amsterdam teeming with delectable goods from near and far; pastries and taffeta, porcelain and books, haberdashery and nautical instruments all clamored for the eyes (and purses) of passers-by, many of whom could indulge in a satisfying trinket as well as the occasional splurge. Unseen by polite society were the sufferings on plantations and ships, in mines and refineries, that made this cornucopia possible.

Banquet still lifes repeat this pattern of presentation and concealment: the heaps of delicacies and baubles simply appear in great quantity, as if by magic rather than toil. The abundance is beguiling. Pluck one grape, slurp one oyster, and there are still plenty more on the table. Their replenishment is all but assured. “There’s more where this came from”, the paintings seem to say. In truth, Dutch consumption was already exhausting some of the resources pictured. The eye-catching lobsters featured in so many of these painted banquets were depleted from Dutch waters within the seventeenth century, sending the nation’s fishermen across the North Sea in search of new stores of the crustacean, and thus multiplying the labor and expense of bringing it to the table.