Still life

He was a successful Still Life painter when a Duke commissioned him to paint a pair of pictures intended to represent the inevitability of decline. The first picture showed a bowl of mouth-wateringly fresh fruit. The second showed the same fruit in decay.

This commission prompted the painter to come up with the idea that was to define the remainder of his career, bringing him fame and wealth. He started to paint sequences of pictures showing events unfolding over a period of time. It became fashionable to hang these pictures together in sequence so that a viewer could walk along and watch the "stories" unfurl.

One patron hung his pictures on hinges along a corridor so that they could be moved out to sit perpendicular to the wall. He then got one of his servants to push him along the corridor in a bath chair so that he could experience the illusion of watching a fat man stepping into an unexpectedly deep puddle.

Some of his work was experimental. One sequence showed, over a dozen canvases, an arrow striking a sack of wine so that an incident that, in reality, occupied a fraction of a second, could be experienced over a period of minutes or hours.

His most popular works were, of course, his famous depictions of kittens falling over or playing with balls of wool.