Osias Beert the Elder Antwerp (?) circa 1580 (?) - 1624

Julius Cohen, Schwerin;
His sale, Berlin, Lepke, 11 December 1917, lot 42 (as by Jan Brueghel);
With Kurt Meissner, Zurich, by 1967;
Thence by inheritance.

Amsterdam, Historisch Museum, 1970, no. 4;
Zurich, Kunsthaus, 50 Jahre Kunsthandelsverband, no. 11.

E. Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au XVIIe siècle, Sterrebeek 1983, pp. 188, 337, no. 86, reproduced fig. 29.

Osias Beert was apprenticed to the Antwerp painter Andries van Baseroy in 1596, and six years later in 1602 was formally received as Master into the Guild of Saint Luke. Though little is known of his life, he remains one of the most important and influential artists of the earliest generation of still-life painters in Flanders. The present work is entirely typical of the 'laden table' still lifes with their elevated viewpoint that Beert himself had pioneered during the first two decades of the 17th century. Beert seems to have habitually reused particular objects in many of his designs, and a number of those found in this painting recur in other works. The façon-de-venise glass goblet and cover, the wine glass and a very similar dish of sweetmeats, for example, appear again in a panel sold in these Rooms, 6 July 1994, lot 17, for £670,000. The bowl of fruit and nuts, the bread and the pewter plate with grapes all recur in a copper of similar dimensions now in the Louvre (reproduced in Greindl, see Literature, p. 187, no. 68, fig. 26). The paucity of signed and dated examples in Beert's known œuvre makes dating of his works particularly difficult, but the present panel probably belongs to the second decade of the century.