Still-Life with an Ebony Chest

In early 17th-century Madrid, Antonio de Pereda was one of the most successful still-life painters, in a period in which this particular genre was becoming more and more popular. He trained at the studio of his father before moving from Valladolid to the Spanish capital, becoming a prot�g� of Giovan Battista Crescenzi, a Roman artist who was Superintendent of the Royal works in Spain. Through Crescenzi, de Pereda absorbed the style of post-Caravaggian naturalism, which combined a taste for simple compositions with great attention to detail with a tendency to accumulate symbolic items in which the significance is not always obvious.