Dutch painter, born in Antwerp. He moved with his parents to Haarlem, where he was documented between 1610 and 1631. In 1635 he married there Tanneken Abeel from Bruges. Only a few paintings by him survived, mostly banquet pieces (banketje or ontbijtje) painted in a style close to that of Floris van Dijck. Floris van Dijck and Nicolaes Gillis exerted a strong influence on the following generation of painters.
The aesthetically conservative principle of tables arranged strictly parallel to the horizontal edges of the painting was followed by Nicolaes Gillis and Floris Claesz van Dijck. (Predecessors were probably family paintings such as Marten van Heemskerck’s.) Their still-lifes are classified as ‘ontbijtjes’ (breakfast still-lifes). Onbijt(je) was a light meal which could be taken at any time of the day. Strictly speaking, most of the paintings by Gillis and van Dijck are dessert still-lifes, developed at roughly the time by Osias Beert and Clara Peeters.
All these artists show a table with a table runner and a carefully ironed, white damask tablecloth whose creases, regardless of the laws of perspective, run in parallel lines towards the back of the painting. A relatively high viewpoint was also chosen, apparently to afford a good overall survey of the objects, which are arranged side by side, or in a circle, hardly ever touching or overlapping. The precious drinking vessels and pieces of textile show very clearly that the arrangement is that of a privileged household.
In accordance with etiquette, fruit, pies, nuts and confectionery were served as a dessert. Cheese, which had a central role in Gillis’s and van Dijck’s art, was also part of the dessert. Gillis and van Dijck build up pyramids of hard cheese in two or three layers: at the bottom there is half a large cheese with a rich, yellow hue, indicating that it is still very young, while on the top the cheeses are smaller and more brownish, almost grey in colour, showing that they are older and more mature. The irregular traces of cuts with a knife - the only piece of cutlery on the table - are rendered extremely well.
