Natureza Morta de Frutas, Incluindo Limões, Uvas, Peras e Cerejas, Junto com Uma Avelã, Tudo Disposto Sobre Uma Mesa Coberta com Uma Toalha Azul (Still Life of Fruit, Including Lemons, Grapes, Pears and Cherries, Together with a Hazelnut, all Arranged on a Table Largely Draped with a Blue Cloth) - Jan Davidszoon de Heem

 

Natureza Morta de Frutas, Incluindo Limões, Uvas, Peras e Cerejas, Junto com Uma Avelã, Tudo Disposto Sobre Uma Mesa Coberta com Uma Toalha Azul (Still Life of Fruit, Including Lemons, Grapes, Pears and Cherries, Together with a Hazelnut, all Arranged on a Table Largely Draped with a Blue Cloth) - Jan Davidszoon de Heem
Coleção privada
OST - 19x23 - 1653


Although he spent much of his career in Antwerp, Jan Davidsz. de Heem is widely regarded as the greatest Dutch still life painter of the 17th century. His still lifes are the culmination of a development of the genre that started with Jan Brueghel the Elder in Antwerp and Ambrosius Bosschaert in Middelburg and Utrecht – De Heem’s home town. No artist was to match the degree of refinement and brilliance of execution that De Heem brought to his still life paintings: it was left to Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum to take the genre into the 18th century and towards a different aesthetic.
Just as talented at painting fruit or flowers, often together and often combined with rich objects and musical instruments in lavish compositions that when on a grandiose scale border on the bombast, De Heem was also equally at home painting much simpler arrangements of fruit on an intimate and much smaller scale. In works such as this beautifully-preserved painting, the viewer can be forgiven for thinking that the artist is deliberately turning his back on his prolix compositions, and exploring the rich vein of very simple, quiet and contemplative still lifes that runs through Netherlandish still life painting throughout the 17th century from some of Bosschaert’s early works in Middelburg circa 1605, via the early works of Haarlem monochrome banketje painters such as Pieter Claesz. and Willem Claesz. Heda, Jan van de Velde and Den Uyl, back to Middelburg at the close of the century and the almost quietist still lifes of Adriaen Coorte.
This jewel-like picture was painted almost exactly half-way through the hundred-year course of this tradition, and is the paradigm of how De Heem, the sometime apostle of more is best also understood so well that less is more.
For reasons unknown, during the first half of the 1650s De Heem seems to have concentrated on small-scale still lifes in which fruit is the predominant motif. A group of these date from 1653 and display distinctive common characteristics: they fill the picture frame, notably so at the top and sides, and they are all signed and dated in the upper left corner, and not on the exposed table-edge. They all share too the intimate character of the present example.