Lot Essay
The artist who signed his work ‘W. Mertens’ has sometimes been thought to have the given name Willem or Wouter. A Wouter Mertens was registered in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1641 as a borduerwerker, or embroiderer, but there is no evidence he ever produced paintings. Adriaan van der Willigen and Fred G. Meijer proposed that the artist responsible for these works could instead be Cornelis Mertens, who was active in Antwerp in the 1640s, as ‘Witte’ was often used as a nickname for Cornelis (op. cit.). Although his first name may be forgotten, Mertens is known today chiefly for a handful of pronkstillevens, or ‘sumptuous’ still lifes, of which the present work is an outstanding example. The only comparable work in the artist's oeuvre is the similarly large-scale signed still life sold Sotheby's, New York, 27 January 2006, lot 246 ($385,600).
This painting has passed through the hands of several storied collectors. It was acquired sometime in the late nineteenth century by Sir Joseph Robinson, with an attribution to Jan Davidsz. de Heem, to whom Mertens’s style is clearly indebted. Robinson moved to South Africa seeking fortune in diamond and gold mining. His underhanded business dealings led him to pay large fines and a scandal broke out when it was uncovered that he paid for his title. His paintings were inherited by his daughter, Ida, who married Prince Natale Labia, an Italian diplomat living in Cape Town. Later, the painting found its way in into the collection of John Heinz III, heir to the H.J. Heinz Company and a United States Senator. Heinz began his collection whilst studying at university, focusing on modern art and later painters of the Hudson River School. In the 1980s, he and his wife, Teresa, began collecting Old Masters, amassing close to 100 works by Dutch and Flemish painters of the Golden Age, with particular focus on still-life painting. Notably, their collection included many of the artists for whom historical documentation is scarce and whose works are rarely encountered on the market.
We are grateful to Fred G. Meijer for endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs and for his assistance in cataloging this lot (private communication, 30 October 2023).
This painting has passed through the hands of several storied collectors. It was acquired sometime in the late nineteenth century by Sir Joseph Robinson, with an attribution to Jan Davidsz. de Heem, to whom Mertens’s style is clearly indebted. Robinson moved to South Africa seeking fortune in diamond and gold mining. His underhanded business dealings led him to pay large fines and a scandal broke out when it was uncovered that he paid for his title. His paintings were inherited by his daughter, Ida, who married Prince Natale Labia, an Italian diplomat living in Cape Town. Later, the painting found its way in into the collection of John Heinz III, heir to the H.J. Heinz Company and a United States Senator. Heinz began his collection whilst studying at university, focusing on modern art and later painters of the Hudson River School. In the 1980s, he and his wife, Teresa, began collecting Old Masters, amassing close to 100 works by Dutch and Flemish painters of the Golden Age, with particular focus on still-life painting. Notably, their collection included many of the artists for whom historical documentation is scarce and whose works are rarely encountered on the market.
We are grateful to Fred G. Meijer for endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs and for his assistance in cataloging this lot (private communication, 30 October 2023).