Still Life with Artichoke, Fruit in Kraak Porcelain Ware, a Salt Cellar/Pepper Castor, Osias Beert (I), c. 1605 - c. 1615 – (Osias Beert The Elder) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Osias Beert The Elder

Date: 1615

Size: 46 x 79 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

Like other related compositions by Osias Beert I, this painting has in the past been attributed to Louise Moillon (1610-1696) and to Georg Flegel (1566-1638).15 Its attribution to Beert was due to Benedict in 1938, who stated that it was the the most beautiful non-signed replica (plus belle réplique non signé) of a work in a private collection, Paris, which was signed with his initials.16 That painting was identified as being with the Galerie Mestrallet in 1938 by Greindl in her list of signed works by Beert.17 She also accepted as autograph another replica in a Belgian private collection which is slightly larger than the present picture.18 Benedict already listed variants in 1938: with the dealer P. de Boer, Amsterdam, in the museums at Kassel and St Omer19 and in a private collection in Paris. In his 1996 catalogue of the Kassel Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Schnackenburg accepted the Rijksmuseum picture as the prototype.20 Meijer had also accepted it in 1994.21 But whether it is Beert’s prime original would depend on examination of the Mestrallet version and that referred to as in a Belgian private collection by Greindl in 1983. Many of the motifs appear in other table top still lifes by Beert; for instance the cluster of three cherries, the stem of the wild strawberries with the knife and the bowls of cherries and strawberries occur in the Still Life of Cherries and Strawberries in Porcelain Bowls at Berlin;22 the bread, diagonally placed, was a favourite motif of his. The fruit is contained in three Kraak porcelain pieces, products of the reign of the Chinese Emperor Wanli (1573-1619). Rinaldi has identified the wild strawberries as placed in a flat-rimmed dish, the mulberries in a bell (or crow) cup and the cherries in a klapmuts.23 No similar decorative motifs are found in Rinaldi’s survey, but that on the rim of the bowl of strawberries, of equidistant flower sprigs, can perhaps be dated circa 1580-1600 by analogy with her ‘Border III’.24 The bell cup is, according to Rinaldi, a rare type perhaps to be dated from circa 1620-35;25 if such a dating is correct, it would rule out the presence of the object here because the painting was probably executed fairly early in the century as is argued below. It may be that the object is a ‘crow cup’ (c. 1595-1645), which seems to have been slightly larger than a bell cup;26 however, the decoration of a flower spray in an ogival panel seems more akin to that on a differently shaped category of bowl of circa 1575-1600.27 The knife is probably a ‘Whitsun knife’; Marquardt illustrates an example described as probably German of the second half of the sixteenth century, whose handle is decorated with scales of dark horn and natural coloured mother-of-pearl.28 The handle of that in the present picture is more elaborate. Similar knives appear in still lifes by Pieter Claesz executed in Haarlem in the 1620s.29 The wine glass is façon de Venise, while the vessel on the right is a typical rummer. Unusual is the silver object on the left seemingly found only in still lifes by Beert. It has been described both as a sugar bowl30 and as a salt cellar, but is in fact a salt cellar topped by a pepper castor, and quite different to the rectangular shaped salt cellars depicted, for instance, by the Antwerp-based Clara Peeters (active 1607-after 1634; see biography under SK-A-2111) in her 1608/09 Still Life of Oysters, Bread and a Salt.31 In Beert’s art it would also function as an egg ‘cup’,32 in which the egg replaced the lid with the pepper castor and rested in the salt. The design of the object derived from the series of engravings of vessels published by Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527-c. 1607) in 1563; the engraving of one is entitled: ‘A vessel whose upper part will furnish pepper and whose lower part in truth salt’, another ‘a vessel whose lower part carried salt and upper part pepper’.33 Fuhring states that there is no extant object that can be related to the designs in the Vessels series;34 however, Baudouin, Colman and Goethals describe silversmiths’ development of the De Vries design in a way which seems not dissimilar to the object depicted by Beert, but without any specific reference.35 Indeed a simplified version of the design and without the top is depicted by Frans Snijders (1579-1657) in his banquet still life at Dublin, dated by Oldfeld and Robels to the late 1620s36 and is also found on the table at which the Prodigal Son feasts with a lady of easy virtue in the decoration by Frans Francken III (1607-1667) of the wing of a painted cabinet showing the story of the Prodigal Son (BK-NM-4190). In the absence of any dated extant work by Beert, other factors have to be brought to bear in suggesting a date for the Rijksmuseum still life. The view point is relatively high – not as high as the Still Life with Dives and Lazarus in which the background scene depends on a print executed before 1611,37 but higher than in the still life painted on a copper stamped by Pieter ../..