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Descriptif du lot
A work of extraordinary contemplative power, this Bowl of wild strawberries with gooseberries on a stone ledge is among the most iconic compositions by Adriaen Coorte, the reclusive master of the understated still life whose radical simplicity would find no true parallel in European painting until the advent of modernism. Signed and dated with the artist’s characteristic arabesque, the picture belongs to the most productive and concentrated phase of Coorte’s career and exemplifies the qualities that have secured his reputation, after nearly three centuries of obscurity, as one of the most compelling still-life painters of the Dutch seventeenth century.
Coorte’s life is almost as spare as his compositions. Born between 1659 and 1664 into a relatively prosperous family from IJzendijke, a small town near Middelburg in the province of Zeeland, the artist likely trained under Melchior d’Hondecoeter in Amsterdam, as his earliest known painting, of 1683 (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum), closely follows that master’s compositions of birds in parkland settings. By the mid-1680s, however, he had returned to the environs of Middelburg, the prosperous trading capital of Zeeland, where he would remain for the rest of his career, producing the small, luminous still lifes that constitute the vast majority of his known oeuvre of approximately one hundred works (Buvelot, op. cit., p. 18). The only documentary trace of the artist during his lifetime is a fine levied by the Middelburg Guild of Saint Luke in 1695⁄6 for selling paintings without being a registered master (A. Bredius, in F. D. O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche Kunstgeschiedenis, IV, 1877, p. 229), a circumstance that has led to the suggestion that Coorte may have worked as a gentleman amateur rather than a professional painter, a notion consonant with the deeply personal, unhurried character of his art.
In stark contrast to the opulent pronk still lifes of his celebrated contemporaries Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch, Coorte confined himself to a deliberately restricted repertoire of humble subjects, among them wild strawberries, gooseberries, asparagus, medlars, peaches and seashells, arranged on a bare stone ledge against a deeply shadowed background. As Laurens Bol, who rescued the artist from near-total oblivion with his pioneering monograph of 1977, aptly characterised him, Coorte was an ‘introverted intimist’ (Sutton, op. cit., p. 87), yet the intensity of his scrutiny was such that his modest subjects attain a presence at once monumental and transcendent. The comparison most frequently drawn is not with his Dutch peers but with the austere bodegones of the early Spanish masters Juan Sánchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurbarán, whose spare compositions share with Coorte’s an almost mystical capacity to charge the simplest of objects with spiritual gravity.
In the present picture of 1696, the year that inaugurated Coorte's most prolific period of activity, his art achieves a characteristic perfection of balance and luminosity. A footed earthenware bowl of warm terracotta, its moulded handle and squat form rendered with quiet solidity, stands on the corner of a stone ledge heaped with wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca), their nubbled skins set aglow by a low-angled raking light from the upper left. A sprig of four green, unripe gooseberries, veined and translucent, their serrated leaves picked out with botanical precision, hangs over the ledge's edge, introducing an element of precarious suspension that subtly animates the otherwise still composition. The background is an impenetrable field of shadow, its dark and neutral expanse conceived to focus the eye on the few brilliantly coloured objects in the foreground, while the stone ledge is so crisply delineated that it reveals the smallest nicks and a narrow crack in its corner, a discreet intimation of time's passage embedded within a scene of seeming permanence.
This interplay between stability and fragility is central to Coorte's pictorial intelligence, for something in his compositions invariably undermines the overall equilibrium, whether a sprig dangling precariously over the edge or a loose strawberry that has rolled to a stop just short of falling. In the present work, the gooseberry sprig performs precisely this function, its casual overhang quietly invoking the vanitas tradition that Coorte had explored in paintings of the mid-to-late 1680s with skulls, an hourglass and smoking requisites (see Buvelot, op. cit., nos. 8 and 10). Yet by 1696, such overt symbols had been entirely absorbed into the fabric of the composition itself; the transience of earthly things is no longer proclaimed but felt, residing in the tension between the glowing plenitude of the strawberries and the vast darkness that surrounds them.
When the picture appeared in the 1977 sale of the collection of Baroness Irene von der Becke-Klüchtzner, it was accompanied by a pendant of identical dimensions, Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants, also signed and dated 1696, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (inv. no. 2002.122.1; fig. 1), the pairing of fruit and vegetable subjects characteristic of Coorte's enduring fascination with pendant relationships. Both Bol and Sam Segal compared the two works to a nearly identical undated pair then in a Dutch private collection (Bol, op. cit., no. 78, fig. 40, and no. 76, fig. 38; Segal, op. cit., p. 90), which share virtually the same motifs, differing only in the inclusion of the strawberry plant's leaf, tendril and flowers. The practice of revisiting successful designs was well established among Coorte's great Middelburg predecessors Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder and Balthasar van der Ast, yet where they elaborated their compositions with encyclopaedic abundance, Coorte isolated his motifs with near-monastic severity, compelling the viewer into prolonged acts of looking.
Middelburg’s temperate climate had long nurtured celebrated gardens where botanists and collectors revelled in the close observation of nature, finding in its smallest creations evidence of the divine, and it is this tradition of contemplative naturalism that profoundly informs Coorte’s art. His wild strawberries, whether presented in the terracotta bowls favoured here or in the small blue-and-white Wan-li vessels that acknowledged the exotic tastes of Zeeland’s merchant collectors, are at once specimens of botanical scrutiny and objects of aesthetic devotion, painted with what Bol described as a ‘lyrical realism’ that elevates the commonplace into the realm of the sublime (op. cit., p. 43). It is this rare quality that accounts for the extraordinary resonance Coorte’s art has found with the modern sensibility. Virtually forgotten for nearly three centuries before his rediscovery in the twentieth century, Coorte, like Vermeer before him, reminds us that the most profound truths in painting are often found not in grandeur but in silence.
Coorte’s life is almost as spare as his compositions. Born between 1659 and 1664 into a relatively prosperous family from IJzendijke, a small town near Middelburg in the province of Zeeland, the artist likely trained under Melchior d’Hondecoeter in Amsterdam, as his earliest known painting, of 1683 (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum), closely follows that master’s compositions of birds in parkland settings. By the mid-1680s, however, he had returned to the environs of Middelburg, the prosperous trading capital of Zeeland, where he would remain for the rest of his career, producing the small, luminous still lifes that constitute the vast majority of his known oeuvre of approximately one hundred works (Buvelot, op. cit., p. 18). The only documentary trace of the artist during his lifetime is a fine levied by the Middelburg Guild of Saint Luke in 1695⁄6 for selling paintings without being a registered master (A. Bredius, in F. D. O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche Kunstgeschiedenis, IV, 1877, p. 229), a circumstance that has led to the suggestion that Coorte may have worked as a gentleman amateur rather than a professional painter, a notion consonant with the deeply personal, unhurried character of his art.
In stark contrast to the opulent pronk still lifes of his celebrated contemporaries Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch, Coorte confined himself to a deliberately restricted repertoire of humble subjects, among them wild strawberries, gooseberries, asparagus, medlars, peaches and seashells, arranged on a bare stone ledge against a deeply shadowed background. As Laurens Bol, who rescued the artist from near-total oblivion with his pioneering monograph of 1977, aptly characterised him, Coorte was an ‘introverted intimist’ (Sutton, op. cit., p. 87), yet the intensity of his scrutiny was such that his modest subjects attain a presence at once monumental and transcendent. The comparison most frequently drawn is not with his Dutch peers but with the austere bodegones of the early Spanish masters Juan Sánchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurbarán, whose spare compositions share with Coorte’s an almost mystical capacity to charge the simplest of objects with spiritual gravity.
In the present picture of 1696, the year that inaugurated Coorte's most prolific period of activity, his art achieves a characteristic perfection of balance and luminosity. A footed earthenware bowl of warm terracotta, its moulded handle and squat form rendered with quiet solidity, stands on the corner of a stone ledge heaped with wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca), their nubbled skins set aglow by a low-angled raking light from the upper left. A sprig of four green, unripe gooseberries, veined and translucent, their serrated leaves picked out with botanical precision, hangs over the ledge's edge, introducing an element of precarious suspension that subtly animates the otherwise still composition. The background is an impenetrable field of shadow, its dark and neutral expanse conceived to focus the eye on the few brilliantly coloured objects in the foreground, while the stone ledge is so crisply delineated that it reveals the smallest nicks and a narrow crack in its corner, a discreet intimation of time's passage embedded within a scene of seeming permanence.
This interplay between stability and fragility is central to Coorte's pictorial intelligence, for something in his compositions invariably undermines the overall equilibrium, whether a sprig dangling precariously over the edge or a loose strawberry that has rolled to a stop just short of falling. In the present work, the gooseberry sprig performs precisely this function, its casual overhang quietly invoking the vanitas tradition that Coorte had explored in paintings of the mid-to-late 1680s with skulls, an hourglass and smoking requisites (see Buvelot, op. cit., nos. 8 and 10). Yet by 1696, such overt symbols had been entirely absorbed into the fabric of the composition itself; the transience of earthly things is no longer proclaimed but felt, residing in the tension between the glowing plenitude of the strawberries and the vast darkness that surrounds them.
When the picture appeared in the 1977 sale of the collection of Baroness Irene von der Becke-Klüchtzner, it was accompanied by a pendant of identical dimensions, Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants, also signed and dated 1696, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (inv. no. 2002.122.1; fig. 1), the pairing of fruit and vegetable subjects characteristic of Coorte's enduring fascination with pendant relationships. Both Bol and Sam Segal compared the two works to a nearly identical undated pair then in a Dutch private collection (Bol, op. cit., no. 78, fig. 40, and no. 76, fig. 38; Segal, op. cit., p. 90), which share virtually the same motifs, differing only in the inclusion of the strawberry plant's leaf, tendril and flowers. The practice of revisiting successful designs was well established among Coorte's great Middelburg predecessors Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder and Balthasar van der Ast, yet where they elaborated their compositions with encyclopaedic abundance, Coorte isolated his motifs with near-monastic severity, compelling the viewer into prolonged acts of looking.
Middelburg’s temperate climate had long nurtured celebrated gardens where botanists and collectors revelled in the close observation of nature, finding in its smallest creations evidence of the divine, and it is this tradition of contemplative naturalism that profoundly informs Coorte’s art. His wild strawberries, whether presented in the terracotta bowls favoured here or in the small blue-and-white Wan-li vessels that acknowledged the exotic tastes of Zeeland’s merchant collectors, are at once specimens of botanical scrutiny and objects of aesthetic devotion, painted with what Bol described as a ‘lyrical realism’ that elevates the commonplace into the realm of the sublime (op. cit., p. 43). It is this rare quality that accounts for the extraordinary resonance Coorte’s art has found with the modern sensibility. Virtually forgotten for nearly three centuries before his rediscovery in the twentieth century, Coorte, like Vermeer before him, reminds us that the most profound truths in painting are often found not in grandeur but in silence.