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拍品专文
This beautifully preserved painting, signed and dated 1625, was executed while the artist was active in Utrecht. Van der Ast had relocated there from Bergen-op-Zoom at some point between 1616 and 1619, having registered as a master in the city’s Guild of St Luke in the latter year. He remained in the city until 1632, when he moved to Delft for the remainder of his career.
A pupil and brother-in-law of Ambrosius Bosschaert I (1573-1621), van der Ast entered his teacher’s household in 1609 following his own father’s death. Like Bosschaert, he painted predominantly flower and fruit still lifes, but also absorbed elements from other still-life painters including Roelandt Savery. In comparison to his master, van der Ast’s work exhibits an expanded pictorial repertoire, which includes a wider variety of fruits and flowers, minutely observed insects and beautifully rendered seashells. Both the striated red and yellow tulip in the Chinese export porcelain vase at right and the exotic seashells in the painting’s central foreground were highly desirable items in seventeenth-century Holland, with vast prices paid by collectors for the best and rarest examples. The shells here include a Cittarium pica (West Indies), Conus marmoreus (Indonesia) and Amphidromus perversus (Southeast Asia), their geographic ranges mirroring that of the Dutch Republic’s reach.
The present work follows a format van der Ast first devised around 1620 in which a shallow bowl of fruit is paired with a bouquet of flowers in a vase, the earliest known example of which is the (twice) signed and dated painting of 1620⁄1 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig. 1). Here, grapes, peaches and apples are piled high onto a wan-li bowl at left while a bouquet of tulips, roses, irises and other flowers in a Chinese export porcelain vase with gold mounts anchors the composition at right. A multitude of other fruits, flowers, insects and shells are scattered across the foreground. As is typical of the artist, very little of the stone ledge and background are left bare, and the contents of the ledge are carefully and deliberately arranged around the bowl and vase, some extending over the edge of the stone into the viewer’s space. Equal consideration is given to colour harmonies, with the orange tonalities of the peaches and apples at left balanced by flowers of similar tonality at right and the red cherries at lower left offset by the currants placed on the other side of the ledge.
A pupil and brother-in-law of Ambrosius Bosschaert I (1573-1621), van der Ast entered his teacher’s household in 1609 following his own father’s death. Like Bosschaert, he painted predominantly flower and fruit still lifes, but also absorbed elements from other still-life painters including Roelandt Savery. In comparison to his master, van der Ast’s work exhibits an expanded pictorial repertoire, which includes a wider variety of fruits and flowers, minutely observed insects and beautifully rendered seashells. Both the striated red and yellow tulip in the Chinese export porcelain vase at right and the exotic seashells in the painting’s central foreground were highly desirable items in seventeenth-century Holland, with vast prices paid by collectors for the best and rarest examples. The shells here include a Cittarium pica (West Indies), Conus marmoreus (Indonesia) and Amphidromus perversus (Southeast Asia), their geographic ranges mirroring that of the Dutch Republic’s reach.
The present work follows a format van der Ast first devised around 1620 in which a shallow bowl of fruit is paired with a bouquet of flowers in a vase, the earliest known example of which is the (twice) signed and dated painting of 1620⁄1 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig. 1). Here, grapes, peaches and apples are piled high onto a wan-li bowl at left while a bouquet of tulips, roses, irises and other flowers in a Chinese export porcelain vase with gold mounts anchors the composition at right. A multitude of other fruits, flowers, insects and shells are scattered across the foreground. As is typical of the artist, very little of the stone ledge and background are left bare, and the contents of the ledge are carefully and deliberately arranged around the bowl and vase, some extending over the edge of the stone into the viewer’s space. Equal consideration is given to colour harmonies, with the orange tonalities of the peaches and apples at left balanced by flowers of similar tonality at right and the red cherries at lower left offset by the currants placed on the other side of the ledge.