Lot 61: * OTTMAR ELLIGER THE ELDER GÖTEBORG 1633 - 1679 BERLIN

signed and dated lower right: Ottmar Elliger/ Fecit An 1666:

A STILL LIFE WITH SPRIGS OF GUELDER-ROSE AND FORGET-ME-NOT RESTING ON A SCULPTED MARBLE LEDGE, AND RED ADMIRAL BUTTERFLIES AND A CABBAGE WHITE, AND LARGE BUGS

9 5/8 by 7 1/2 in; 24.5 by 19.2 cm.

oil on panel

PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR

With Robert Noortman, Maastricht, from whom bought by the present collector.

Elliger trained with Daniel Seghers in Antwerp, and thereafter went to Amsterdam, where he married in 1660 the daughter of Jacob van Walscapelle. In 1666, the year of this picture, he is recorded in Hamburg, where he seems to have stayed until appointed Hofmaler in Berlin in 1670. In his earlier works such as this one, he favoured small, upright assymmetric still lifes, with a seemingly random assortment of elements informally arranged. A similar painting to the present one, with objects arranged on the same ledge supported by a carved face, dated 1664, is in Dessau, Schloss Mosigkau (see E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Luca Bild-Lexikon, Lingen 1995, vol. 2, pp. 322-3, reproduced (wrongly in horizontal format), fig. 116/2).

Elliger was at his most successful in pictures such as these, in which he gave free reign to idiosyncratic optical effects. Here, for example, the Red Admiral butterfly seems to float before the picture-plane, as if it belonged to the realm of the viewer rather than the painting, and giving the picture a sharp sense of depth, in which the still life subject appears to sit behind the space thus created. The composition is carefully and artfully composed to give an impression of being utterly random.