Still Life with Nautilus Cup, 1662 Willem Kalf (1619-1693)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Willem Kalf also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Still Life with Nautilus Cup is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A ribbon of lemon peel unspools over the marble ledge, pale as parchment and edged with a faint, knife-cut burr. Beside it, a blue-and-white Ming bowl tilts, its lid resting askew like a hat momentarily set down. Farther back rises the gilt nautilus cup, its dragon mount poised mid-snarl; behind it a lidded glass glows rose, catching a shard of light that slides diagonally across the dark. Fabrics accumulate at the right: a Persian carpet slumps in thick folds, its crimsons and umbers pooling into shadow, while a single orange sits taut-skinned at the edge, stem and leaf still attached.

From left to right, Willem Kalf choreographs temperature and texture. Cool porcelain meets warm metal, then soft pile gives way to polished stone. Light does the real engineering. It needles the rim of the nautilus, skims the lip of the glass cover, and grazes the lemon’s pith. Look closely at that pith: Kalf drags a nearly dry brush so the paint catches the canvas tooth, a dry scumble that turns oil into rind. Elsewhere he relies on glazing, translucent layers that float color—amber over brown, carmine over umber—so metals don’t merely shine, they seem to breathe.

Composed on a deep, almost velvety ground, the picture advances by a series of verticals and teetering diagonals: the stem of the goblet, the upward thrust of the nautilus, the leftward sweep of the carpet’s pattern as it spills off the table. Nothing feels accidental. Even the tiny highlight on the dragon’s eye aligns with the pink wedge of wine, knitting foreground to depth. One can make out, inside the nautilus belly, the ghost of a window grid—a square of daylight echoed, diminished, and curved. It is a quiet bravura.

Context matters. In the Dutch Golden Age, still life had both independence and appetite. Luxury objects—Ming porcelain, Persian carpets, virtuoso glass—entered Dutch homes and Dutch pictures alike. Willem Kalf, more than most, turned such goods into theatre. Compare the chromatic richness here with the cooler restraint of Pieter Claesz; where Claesz favors pewter calm, Kalf leans into gilded drama. Signed and dated, this 1662 canvas fixes a point in his chronology and, housed today in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, also anchors his international reach.

Listen, perhaps, for the soft clink of the glass cover settling back onto its rim, or the papery whisper of the carpet’s fringe dragging the ledge. These objects are expensive, yes, yet their arrangement has a twinge of contingency—a lid left open, a fruit not yet peeled, a luxury cup momentarily unattended. Consider the dragon. Its scaled ferocity crowns a vessel made from a sea creature’s shell; nature and artifice strike a pact that feels both triumphant and uneasy. After long looking, the picture resolves into a study of appetite held in check: sweetness, acidity, wealth, and time measured out by glints.

Willem Kalf paints desire with discipline. He gives the eye pleasure and the mind a puzzle about value—what endures, what tarnishes, what slips off the table when we turn away. In a world that still inventories its treasures, this still life feels unexpectedly current.