A glass bowl, a pewter plate, a tazza and wicker baskets with cherries, apples, pears, figs and other fruits, with a vase of flowers and artichokes, on stepped ledges

Antonio Ponce was born in Valladolid in 1608 but grew up in Madrid. At the age of sixteen his recently widowed mother apprenticed him to Juan van der Hamen (1596-1631), probably the most important Spanish still life painter in the first half of the seventeenth century. The ties between the two artists were further strengthened four years later when Ponce married Francisca de Alfaro, van der Hamen's niece. Van der Hamen's art had a strong influence on the younger artist. Ponce often used the compositional device of stepped ledges that van der Hamen deployed and also took particular motifs directly from his master's paintings: in the present work, for example, the plate of figs and cherries and the double basket with the glass bottle beside it come from a still life by van der Hamen in the Naseiro collection (see P. Cherry, Arte y Naturaleza. El Bodegón Español en el Siglo de Oro, Madrid, 1999, pl. XXXVI, no. 2). Interestingly, these same objects also recur in another still life by Ponce depicting the month of April (ibid., pl. XLVIII, no. 1). The use of a relatively light background in the present work, however, distinguishes Ponce's art from van der Hamen's, and is perhaps suggestive of the indirect influence of Caravaggio's, most notably his celebrated Basket of Fruit in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. On this basis the present still life can be tentatively dated to the 1640s.