Property from a German Private Collection
Cornelis Kick
Still life with parrot tulips, poppies, roses, snowballs, and other flowers in an auricular silver vase on a stone ledge
Lot Closed
December 9, 03:03 PM GMT
Estimate
30,000 - 40,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Property from a German Private Collection
Cornelis Kick
Amsterdam 1635 - 1681
Still life with parrot tulips, poppies, roses, snowballs, and other flowers in an auricular silver vase on a stone ledge
oil on canvas
unframed: 84.9 x 64.8 cm.; 33⅜ x 25½ in.
framed: 94.7 x 74.4 cm.; 37¼ x 29¼ in.
With Arthur Tooth & Sons, London (as Willem van der Aelst, and signed), by 1952;
From whom acquired shortly thereafter by a private collector, UK;
By whose daughter-in-law anonymously sold ('The Property of a Lady'), London, Sotheby's, 6 London 2011, lot 33, where acquired.
Cornelis Kick reportedly began his career painting genre scenes and portraits, but according to Arnold Houbraken turned his attention to still life following the successful example of the great Jan Davidsz. de Heem.
Paintings by Kick are rare, but those we know of display comparable motifs to the present work, including the thick, wavy stems of the poppies and tulips, and the inverted leaves of the roses, which fall over the ledge; see, for example, in the signed painting offered at Sotheby's, New York, 24 January 2008, lot 58.1
Despite its signature, the latter work – like others by Kick – was once attributed to his pupil, Jacob van Walscapelle (1644–1727), who joined Kick's workshop in circa 1664. Indeed, a painting signed and dated 1667 by Walscapelle, today at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, evidently relied on the same model drawings or studies of the poppy, seen here upper left, and the rose, on the right side of the vase.2
We are grateful to Dr Fred G. Meijer for re-endorsing the attribution to Kick, and for dating it to the late 1660s or early 1670s, on the basis of first-hand inspection.