Lot 42: Jan Davidsz. de Heem (Utrecht 1606-1683/4 Antwerp)

A Dutch Delft blue and white porcelain bowl, a sliced herring with spring onions on a pewter plate with bread, cherries, a knife and a rose, a lobster on a pewter plate in a basket, a lily, a rose, buttercups and other flowers in a pewter vase with a lemon and two façon de Venise wine glasses on a partly-draped table
signed 'J D ·De Heem f.' (upper left)
oil on panel
18 1/4 x 25 1/4 in. (46.3 x 64.1 cm.)

Berlin, Ausstellung des Kaiser-Friedrich Museums-Verein, 1906, no. 58.

W. von Stumm, Madrid, by 1906.
Anonymous sale; Weinmuller, Munich, 28-29 October 1970, lot 788.

THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE SWISS FOUNDATION

Jan Davidsz. de Heem, one the greatest Netherlandish still-life painters of the seventeenth century, was trained in his native Utrecht. Having worked in Leiden, he settled in the Habsburg-controlled southern Netherlands, being enrolled in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke between September 1635 and September 1636. By then he was already an accomplished still-life painter of some thirty years of age.

The Antwerp tradition of still-life painting, sustained by the followers of Jan Brueghel I and enriched by Frans Snyders, must have been congenial to de Heem, who never wholly accommodated his vision to the monochrome style developed in the 1630s by Pieter Claesz. and Willem Claesz. Heda in Haarlem. In Antwerp, de Heem's love of rich colour effects, precious objects delicately portrayed and fruits of the earth in abundance found expression in a baroque style, first fully expressed in the picture of 1640 in the Louvre.

Within that context, however, the present work is of particular interest, representing as it does de Heem's development of the Haarlem breakfast still life, to which he adds a sense of luxury in the costly objects depicted, as well as a visual complexity created chiefly by the bowl balanced on the ointment jar. As Sam Segal has pointed out (catalogue of the exhibition, A Prosperous Past, Stedelijk Museum, Delft and elsewhere, 1988, p. 141) de Heem's 'success was grounded in the integration of the different methods, tendencies and ideas of his contemporaries, which in turn led him to new and original concepts'.

We are grateful to Mr. Fred Meijer who dates the present work to the 1640s.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium