A parakeet on an upturned basket, with fruit, a pewter plate, a vase of flowers, insects, a lizard and shells on a stone ledge

This well-preserved still life belongs to a small group of paintings by Balthasar van der Ast that Laurens J. Bol characterised under the heading of ‘Complex Show Piece’, wherein the artist included three or more main elements. Here, a central pewter plate with fruit overflowing its rim projects from a stone ledge. On the left, a parakeet sits atop an overturned wicker basket that balances precariously over its former contents. Meanwhile, the composition at right is anchored by a simple bouquet of roses, tulips, an iris and a columbine in a dark-coloured, gilt footed glass vase. Various exotic shells and a lizard populate the painting’s foreground as a fly and bee busily buzz overhead.

While van der Ast’s development is difficult to fully ascertain due to the scarcity of signed works after 1628, such complex compositions as this are generally thought to date to the artist’s maturity. Another such example showing a wicker basket with fruit at centre, porcelain dish with two lobsters at left and a monkey, fruit and flowers, dated 1641, was on the Amsterdam art market in the middle of the last century (see Bol, op. cit., p. 85, no. 112). Sam Segal, who had the opportunity to study the present painting in 1989, felt that it likewise dated to around 1640, while Fred Meijer has more recently proposed that it could have been painted from the mid-1630s on.

The origins of the present composition can be found in paintings such as the somewhat stiffly arranged panel datable to the 1620s in the Museum Flehite, Amersfoort (inv. no. 0001-129). In a painting from the same decade and today in the Toledo Museum of Art (fig. 1), van der Ast appears to have settled upon the various compositional elements that would come to define this and other works of its type for the remainder of his career: some combination of a wicker basket (in this instance upright and its contents intact), parakeet, fruit (either on a platter, strewn across a ledge or both), exotic shells and a floral bouquet. Among the most comparable paintings of this type is the still life with an overturned wicker basket in the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama (c.1629 or after 1632; inv. no. AFI.3.2002) and the exceptional still life with a parakeet in the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati (1640s; inv. no. 2000.1). These unusually large-scale paintings afforded their viewers in van der Ast’s time, as now, the opportunity to appreciate his versatility as a still-life painter and his gift for artfully designed, complex displays.