In this large and engaging painting, Vincenzo Campi renders one of his most recognizable and classic subjects: a young fruit and vegetable seller surrounded by her wares.  A variation on the artist’s celebrated Fruttivendola in the Pinacoteca di Brera (fig. 1),¹ the present composition is filled with a new array of produce and is animated with differing characters, most notably the young man at left with an amusingly contorted face and a finger in his ear.  Yet, just like the version in Brera, Campi has anchored this scene with a beautiful female, setting her slightly off center within a foreground teeming with baskets of goods and placing her before a landscape within which two figures are gathering fruit from the branches of a tree that rises along edge of the painting.  Signed and dated 1583, this is a mature work by Vincenzo Campi that exemplifies the types of naturalistic, and sometimes humorous, genre scenes he turned to after the 1570s.

Like the Brera example, which is part of a series relating to a group of paintingscommissioned by the Great banking house of Fugger for Schloss Kirchheim around 1580, the present composition serves to highlight the intriguing links between Campi and the treatment of similar subjects by northern artists such as Joachim Beuckelaer.²  Around the mid-sixteenth century, the Flemish Beuckelaer, along with his teacher Pieter Aertsen, established a new tradition of still-life painting with renderings of elaborate displays of food in markets and kitchens.  The impact of this new genre spread throughout Europe and found a stronghold in Lombardy with Vincenzo Campi, who may have had access to Beuckelaer’s works in Cremona. 

The theme found in the present painting was undoubtedly popular among collectors during Campi’s lifetime, for in addition to the present work, the version in Brera, and the series in Schloss Kirchheim, a few other iterations are known by the artist, including one formerly with Colnaghi in London.³

1.  Inv. no. 333, oil on canvas, 145 by 210 cm
2.  The other paintings from the Brera series include Pescivendoli and Pollivendoli, see F. Paliaga, 1997, in Literature, pp. 175-176, cat. nos. 25-26, reproduced plates XXII and XXIII.  For the Kirchheim series, all of which measure around 135 by 220 cm and some of which are dated to 1580 and 1581, see ibid., pp. 177-179, cat. nos. 29-33, reproduced figs. 14-18.
3.  Oil on canvas, 143 by 214 cm.  See Ibid., p. 181, cat. no. 37, reproduced plate XXIX.