Breakfast

Paintings of food laid out on a table was popular from the beginning of the 17th century. Floris van Schooten was an early specialist of this category. He, as well as other specialists like Floris van Dijck (1575-1651) and Nicolaes Gillis (active c. 1610-30), worked at Haarlem, but interest in this subject was not confined to Haarlem, or indeed to painters working in Holland. In every country of Europe, early Baroque artists reacted more spontaneously to the visual world than their predecessors did, and there are Flemish, French, German, Spanish, and Italian still-life painters who share the stylistic and iconographic features found in Floris van Schooten.