- 24
Osias Beert the Elder
Description
- Osias Beert the Elder
- A still life of apples and grapes in a blue-and-white porcelain bowl, raspberries and walnuts in pewter dishes, plums on a pewter dish atop a stand, together with three wine-glasses and sprigs of apricots and gooseberries upon a wooden table
- oil on oak panel
Provenance
Condition
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Catalogue Note
This painting is entirely characterstic of the 'laden-table' still lifes with their elevated viewpoint that Beert had helped pioneer in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Although Beert's work as a flower-painter has been recognised only in the last thirty years or so, his importance as one of the most influential painters of this form of still life has always been acknowledged. As was his wont, Beert has constructed the composition around the carefully spaced and intersecting diagonals of plates of fruit and nuts, anchored at the back by a raised dish of prunes, and interspersed by standing wine-glasses. The stand beneath the dish of prunes is not distinct, but is probably the oriental lacquer box that appears in other works by Beert, such as the Still life with oysters and other dishes formerly in Berlin1 or the Still life with fruits and wine-glasses from his studio sold, London, Christie's, 10 July 2002, lot 22. The dishes of raspberries and the blue-and-white porcelian bowl filled with apples and grapes are all staples of Beert's output, the latter habitually anchoring the foreground of the design. The distinctive glass filled with white wine on the left of the painting was no doubt Beert's own, for it recurs in numerous other works, for example that sold in these Rooms, 14 December 2000, lot 9. The close inter-relationship of these still lifes suggests that they were the product of practised production and thus are likely to be mature works, but the fact that Beert only very rarely signed and never dated his works makes a certain dating fraught with difficulty.
1. Panel, 53 by 79 cm.; reproduced in E. Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au 17e siècle, Brussels 1983, p. 183, fig. 18.