Artists’ Artists: Pio Abad on An Eccentric Still Life

In the summer of 2014, while I was preparing for my first solo exhibition in London, I would often find myself going to the National Gallery, seeking inspiration from a newly refurbished room in the museum.

‘Gallery A’ was a little-known space underneath the museum’s crowded main galleries that had previously functioned primarily as a storage facility for works that didn’t make it to the main displays. When I started visiting the space, it had been transformed into a permanent display where the viewer could traverse the entire span of the National Gallery through lesser-known works that were unfamiliar to them. This was the history of Western painting in a minor key: works completed in the studios of great painters by their assistants, painted sketches of masterpieces, or pieces by artists whose names had succumbed to the fashions and fluctuations of art history.

As someone whose own work is invested in the hidden narratives behind collections and in uncovering the individuals, ideologies and anecdotes that shape them, I was captivated by this summary of the National Gallery told through its bit players: a museum within a Museum.

I spent hours gazing at one particular painting in Gallery A: Still Life with a Nautilus Cup, painted in c.1645 and attributed to the 17th-century Dutch artist Gerret Willemsz. Heda. Little is known about Heda, son of the more renowned Willem Claesz. Heda. This painting is a collection displayed within a collection, a composition of lushly painted surfaces and ornately detailed objects tumbling on to one another. As his father’s pupil, Heda the Younger continued the family trade of painting still lifes for the newly monied merchants amassing their fortunes through the Dutch East India Company. The pronkstilleven (sumptuous still life) paintings that the Hedas became known for emerged as a popular style in the 17th century, intended to showcase the foreign products reshaping the Dutch economy and culture: Chinese porcelain and Persian carpets; Southeast Asian spices such as nutmeg and cloves; silver and pewter from the Americas.

I was particularly drawn to the object that is the focus of Heda’s composition. Amid the cluttered aftermath of a gloriously overblown banquet stands a nautilus cup – one that is often singled out as the most ornate example depicted in pronkstilleven paintings. These cups were designed as settings for exotic nautilus shells. This one has a silver frame that depicts the gilded figures of Neptune and his fierce mythical attendants riding a winged seahorse. Such elaborate cups were never intended to be functional, but were produced to serve as the centrepiece of the cabinets of curiosities that merchants were assembling in their homes, precursors to the encyclopaedic museum as we know it today.

Described by art historian Marsely Kehoe as an important juxtaposition of the foreign and the domestic, the nautilus cup brought the Dutch trading empire into the home. The nautilus shell is native to the south-west Pacific, near the Spice Islands, in what are now the Philippines and Indonesia. With the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch monopolized the Spice Islands’ trade and subsequently the import of nautilus shells to the West. The silver used by Dutch goldsmiths was most likely mined in South America.

My longstanding fascination with pronkstilleven paintings comes from my own exploration of the home as a site where political and colonial entanglements can be considered – where the foreign and the domestic not only commingle, but are, in fact, one and the same. Within the curious hybrid object at the centre of Heda’s painting lies an entire history of expansion and extraction.

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters, London 2024 under the title ‘Pio Abad on Gerret Willemsz. Heda's Still Life with a Nautilus Cup’.

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_{Main image: Probably by Gerret Willemsz. Heda, Still Life with a Nautilus Cup, c.1645. Oil on oak, 85 × 100 cm. Courtesy: © The National Gallery, London}