painting textures and surfaces in great detail and with realistic light effects. Food of all kinds laid out on a table, silver cutlery, intricate patterns and subtle folds in tablecloths and flowers all challenged painters. Dutch painters produced still lifes in great numbers, revealing the Dutch "love of domestic culture". The English term "derives from the Dutch word stilleven", which came into use about 1650. Several types of subject were recognised: banketje were "banquet pieces", ontbijtjes simpler "breakfast pieces". Virtually all still lifes had a moralistic message, usually concerning the brevity of life – this is known as the vanitas theme – implicit even in the absence of an obvious symbol like a skull, or less obvious one such as a half-peeled lemon (like life, sweet in appearance but bitter to taste). Flowers wilt and food decays, and silver is of no use to the soul. Nevertheless, the force of this message seems less powerful in the more elaborate pieces of the second half of the century. Initially the objects shown were nearly always mundane. However, from the mid-century pronkstillevens ("ostentatious still lifes"), which depicted expensive and exotic objects and had been developed as a subgenre in the 1640s in Antwerp by Flemish artists such as Frans Snyders and Adriaen van Utrecht, became more popular. The early realist, tonal and classical phases of landscape painting had counterparts in still life painting. Willem Claeszoon Heda (1595–c. 1680) and Willem Kalf (1619–1693) led the change to the pronkstilleven, while Pieter Claesz (d. 1660) preferred to paint simpler "ontbijt" ("breakfast pieces"), or explicit vanitas pieces. In all these painters, colours are often very muted, with browns dominating, especially in the middle of the century. This is less true of the works of Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606–1684), an important figure who spent much of his career based over the border in Antwerp. Here his displays began to sprawl sideways to form wide oblong pictures, unusual in the north, although Heda sometimes painted taller vertical compositions. Still life painters were especially prone to form dynasties, it seems: there were many de Heems and Bosschaerts, Heda's son continued in his father's style, and Claesz was the father of Nicholaes Berchem. Flower paintings formed a sub-group with its own specialists, and were occasionally the speciality of the few women artists, such as Maria van Oosterwyck and Rachel Ruysch. The Dutch also led the world in botanical