Oysters on a pewter dish, a Wanli porcelain bowl, three façon-de-Venise wine glasses, oranges, lemons, chestnuts and a knife with a chiselled steel handle with mother-of-pearl plaques, on a table

Osias Beert was one of the key pioneers and innovators of still life painting in Europe, together with his contemporaries Georg Flegel, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder and Jan Brueghel the Elder. While very few details are known about Beert's life, his importance as one of the most influential artists of the earliest generation of still-life painters in Flanders has always been readily acknowledged. He seems to have spent his whole life in Antwerp, where he became a master of the painters’ Guild of Saint Luke in 1602, and where he is also recorded as being a cork merchant and a member of the Chamber of Rhetoric. Beert enjoyed great fame during his lifetime, which is attested to by his numerous pupils and his tremendous influence on subsequent generations of Antwerp still-life painters, including Clara Peeters, Jacob van Hulsdonck, Jacob van Es and his nephew, Frans Ykens.

We are grateful to Dr. Fred Meijer for confirming the attribution (on the basis of images) and dating the work to circa 1610. Many of the motifs in the present composition appear in other table top still lifes by Beert; for instance the pewter dish of oysters, the three façon-de-venise wine glasses, and the same vessel containing the chestnuts placed on top of a wooden box all appear in Beert’s still life in the Museo del Prado, Madrid (Inv. P001606), a panel dated to the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The aforementioned splint wooden box is likely to have contained quince paste, as revealed in other compositions by the artist, notably the Still Life with oysters, cookies, and comfits in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which, like the present work, can be dated to circa 1610.