Jan Davidsz. de Heem (Utrecht 1606-1684 Antwerp) Grapes, peaches, blackberries, scallops, chestnuts, and façon-de-Venise wine glasses on a partially draped stone ledge with a snail, a butterfly, and a bumblebee signed 'J D De Heem' (upper right) oil on oak panel 15 ½ x 18 ½ in. (39.4 x 47 cm.)
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2001-2015, on loan.
Literature
P.A.B. Widener, Catalogue of paintings forming the private collection of P.A.B. Widener, Ashbourne, near Philadelphia, Paris, 1885-1900, II, no. 209.
E. Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au XVIIe siècle, Brussels, 1956, p. 171.
E. Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au XVIIe siècle, Sterrebeek, 1983, pp. 126-27 and 359-60, no. 16.
Provenance
(Possibly) B. Beeckman, Rotterdam; his sale, Lamme, Rotterdam, 9 June 1828, lot 7, as‘Eene tafel waarop bij eene geopende oester twee bekers met wijn gevuld staan, benevens witte en blaauwe druiven met eenige perziken en ander vrugten leggen, op dewelke verscheide insecten azen. Pan. 39=46 d.’ (85 florins to Lamme).
Woortman collection, 19th century.
P.A.B. Widener, Philadelphia by 1885; Frederick Muller, Amsterdam, 14 May 1912, lot 123(3,700 florins).
Private collection, France.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, New York, 15 January 1993, lot 88.
with Richard Green, London, April 1993, where acquired by the present owners.
Notes
Displaying an elegant blend of material opulence, visual richness, and meticulous execution, this still-life is an exquisite work from Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s maturity. With soft rays of light beaming through an unseen opening in the upper left, De Heem has carefully arranged the various components on a stone ledge, draped with a blue silk cloth on the right-hand side. Characteristically, the artist has created a balanced composition, built around a strong diagonal axis leading the eye from the beautifully drawn, crumpled vine leaf at the upper left to the delicate ‘Atalante’ butterfly, down to the discarded scallop shell in the lower right. This line is broken by the bunch of crimson red grapes, with their serpentine tendrils, and the two precious façon-de-Venise glass chalices, shimmering in the dark background. The apparent stillness and the sense of silence conveyed by the supreme harmony of the composition is disrupted by hints of movement: insects of all sorts populate the scene while the apricot and the blackberries in the foreground are in danger of toppling over the ledge.
It is no coincidence, of course, that the objects and foodstuffs so artfully assembled were all rare luxury items in seventeenth-century Holland. It is an example of the genre of pronk still-life painting that flourished at the height of the Dutch Golden Age; as a conspicuous display of wealth and refinement for the new mercantile classes in the Netherlands, it was hard to surpass. Here, there may be a coded moral message too: the wine served in the glasses and the grapes are a reminder of licentious pleasures, while the scallops were considered a notorious aphrodisiac at the time. For De Heem, it was a genre in which he excelled and there was no better stage on which to demonstrate his consummate observation of nature. His rendering of difference surfaces, his suggestion of texture and form are exemplary: from the translucent, reflective glass to the furry bumblebee; from the spiky husk of the chestnut to the grape’s opaque skin; from the scallop’s watery flesh to its rugged shell. The exactitude and precision of technique required to achieve such a range of effects, on such a limited scale, still produces a sense of wonder.
The decision to arrange the composition such that the corner of the stone ledge is placed in the centre, angled towards the viewer, seems unique in De Heem’s oeuvre. This clever device, receding in space, increases the sense of depth in the whole picture, while its sharp edges create a further contrast with the soft shapes of the fruits above. Some key motifs can be found in other pictures by De Heem. The butterfly became a quite common trope in the artist’s work from 1648 onwards, and the same bumblebee can be found in several pictures. Fred Meijer has pointed out that both glasses also feature in a still-life (England, private collection) in which comparable graceful vine leaves and tendrils appear as well. Two pictures, Garlands of fruits and flowers (The Hague, Mauritshuis; and formerly Berlin, Kaiser Friedrich Museum, destroyed during the war) include chestnuts, peaches, blackberries and grapes rendered in a very similar fashion to the present painting. These three pictures also bear a signature that is calligraphically comparable to the one in our picture. These strong stylistic connections allow for a dating of the present work to circa 1670, like the Mauristhuis panel and that formerly in Berlin. This period marked a moment of transition in De Heem’s oeuvre, prompted by his return from Antwerp to his native Utrecht, in the northern Netherlands, where he is documented as an inhabitant in 1665. There, he moved away from the more painterly and baroque Flemish style he had adopted in Antwerp, and developed a smoother and finer technique, close to the Dutch fijnschilders, which enhanced his ever-present attention to detail, as is manifest in the present picture. The absence of panel maker’s mark – a very frequent feature of panels made in Antwerp – supports the theory that this work was painted in Utrecht.
At the turn of the century, this picture belonged to the legendary American industrialist, philanthropist and patron of the arts Peter A.B. Widener. A founding benefactor of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Widener collected old masters in the princely tradition. He parted with this still-life in 1912, four years after the visit that the great connoisseur, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, had paid to his collection. During that visit, de Groot unveiled many misattributions, but this picture was not amongst them; in fact, he praised it in a note kept in his personal archive.
We are grateful to Fred Meijer of the RKD, The Hague, for his kind assistance in cataloguing this lot.
