Still Life with Sweets (1622): Art, History and Details

Still Life with Sweets (1622) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Juan van der Hamen y Léon (Spanish, 1596–1631).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Placed on a simple stone ledge, this bold arrangement includes a wooden box, a dark glass bottle, some walnuts, an elaborate Venetian glass, and several sweets called turrones. These delicacies are a mixture of pine nuts, honey, almonds, and hazelnuts. The picture may not represent an actual meal or snack. Rather, the artist played with contrasts and harmonies of shapes, textures, and colors. During his short career van der Hamen, whose father was from the Netherlands, worked at the Spanish royal court and created biblical pictures, history paintings, allegories, and landscapes. He is best known for his portraits and still lifes.

Object facts

• Title: Still Life with Sweets
• Date: 1622
• Creator attribution: Juan van der Hamen y Léon (Spanish, 1596–1631)
• Culture: Spain
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 83 x 122 x 7.5 cm (32 11/16 x 48 1/16 x 2 15/16 in.); Unframed: 58 x 97 cm (22 13/16 x 38 3/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Spanish before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.6

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Christie, Manson & Woods International Inc. Important Paintings by Old Masters. Thursday, January 11, 1979. Christie's: New York, NY, 1979. Lot 65.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1980.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163–219.
• Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. La Nature Morte Espagnole: Du XVIIe SièCle à Goya. Paris: Office du Livre, Editions Vilo, 1987. fig. 36.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.