Rotterdam 1619–Amsterdam 1693
Willem Kalf was born in Rotterdam in 1619. He was the greatest still life painter of his generation. Occasionally, throughout his life, he painted small scenes of kitchens and barns, but his most typical and most popular works were the so-called pronken (ostentatious) still lifes that showed costly artifacts of metal, glass and porcelain. Kalf was in Paris between 1642 and 1646. In 1651 he married, at Hoom, a talented woman, Comelia Fluvier, who was a diamond- engraver, calligrapher and poet. In 1653 he settled in Amsterdam, where he worked until his death in 1693.
The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, John Nash, London, 1972