Joachim Beuckelaer, 'The Four Elements: Air', 1570

Packed with fish, fruit, vegetables, birds and animals, these four big pictures are like giant stage sets, teeming with life. The boundaries between painting and reality seem to have dissolved – people look directly out at us, offering us a plethora of produce which seems in danger of tumbling out into the real world. Although superficially market and kitchen scenes, the different types of food represent the four elements: vegetables for earth, fish for water, poultry for air and game for fire. In the backgrounds are biblical scenes.

Although Joachim Beuckelaer has created an impression of great abundance and variety, the foods shown were readily available to ordinary Netherlanders for most of the sixteenth century. However, these pictures were painted at a time of cruel political and religious repression and severe economic recession. Terrible weather, poor harvests, wars and high taxes combined to make life almost unendurable. They perhaps show a remembered golden age, when food was plentiful. Fascinatingly, he makes no reference to payment in any of the pictures.

All four compositions are constructed in the same way, with two people at the front surrounded by still lifes heaped on baskets, barrows, tables, stools and shelves. In the background are other groups – customers, cooks and passers-by – and right at the back are religious scenes. The level and accuracy of detail makes us feel that the images are completely credible, although the compositions are contrived and there’s no logic to the space: landscapes are not continuous, perspectives run in different directions and the interior in The Four Elements: Fire is oddly distorted. The colours fade as they recede, helping clarify the complicated spatial arrangements.

Beuckelaer specialised in elaborate displays of food, and these paintings are the culmination of themes he explored in other pictures. The same details recur in many of his paintings, although he rarely repeated the same setting or figure exactly, instead enlarging, reducing and reversing them as he wished. He clearly kept an archive of sketches, but technical investigations have shown that the underdrawing was done freehand, not copied mechanically. He also worked constantly from life: he had several models whom he used frequently and kept a wardrobe of clothes in which to dress them. It seems that for common objects, birds and animals, Beuckelaer referred to the real thing as well as sketches, improvising and making variations on themes in his archives. For more unusual objects – such as the artichokes in The Four Elements: Earth – he followed his preliminary studies more faithfully.

The pictures are painted on canvas and are variously dated 1569 or 1570. Beuckelaer normally painted on panel but would have used canvas for large pictures that were to be exported. This group may well have been commissioned in Antwerp by a foreigner, probably Fernão Ximenes, one of the deputies of the Portugese Consul and an art collector and bibliophile. Fernão must have been well aware that easily portable paintings on canvas were preferable to large, heavy panels: he‘d had to leave Antwerp in a hurry during the iconoclast riots in 1564. By 1884 the paintings were in Florence, in the Palazzo Panciatichi-Ximenes d’Aragona.

The appearance of all four pictures has been seriously affected by the deterioration of an unstable blue pigment called smalt, which Beuckelaer used for skies and garments. The skies are now greyish-cream not blue, and clothes were originally a variety of purples and blues.