Peaches, plums, oranges, apples, cherries, grapes, redcurrants, blackcurrants, crab apples and other fruit in a pewter vase, with a red admiral butterfly, a dragonfly and other insects, with grapes and other fruit, seashells, a lizard, a caterpillar and a wasp on a ledge

This painting is among the largest panels and rarest compositional types in the oeuvre of the pioneering still-life painter Balthasar van der Ast. Only one other panel, in upright format, features a bouquet containing fruits, flowers and vines arranged in a vase (fig. 1; Sotheby’s, London, 6 December 2006, lot 10). Both that and the present composition date to circa 1635-45, when van der Ast was already in Delft, where he would remain for the rest of his life. His still lifes from this period are marked by their inventive compositional schemes, as well as a unified tonality and subtle use of light to create volume, all of which are on display here.

Van der Ast undertook his artistic training in the workshop of his brother-in-law, the still-life painter Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. While Bosschaert tended to treat flowers and fruit as discrete subgenres, van der Ast merged these into ‘combined’ compositions; perhaps taken to its final extreme here, where the fruits and vines form the central bouquet. The painting’s various elements are presented in relative isolation, perhaps a result of van der Ast’s practice of using highly detailed preparatory drawings. The frequent recurrence of similar species of shells across van der Ast’s paintings suggests that he may have owned a number of examples: the Murex motacilla shell, featured at center here, just behind a wasp, appears in a number of paintings from the 1640s.