Still Life with Assorted Fruit

about 1622

Medium

Oil on panel

Dimensions

26 × 34.3 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-135877

In this small painting Pieter Claesz presents the viewer with an array of perfectly ripe fruits, a few nuts, and a luminous glass of white wine on a freshy pressed plain-damask tablecloth. *Still Life with Assorted Fruit* is one of the earliest examples of a still life focused primarily on assorted fruits (known as a *fruijtagie*) and a key painting in Claesz’s early career. Instead of the more traditional wide and high bird’s-eye viewpoint, Claesz employed a compact composition and a more direct, frontal vantage, an integrated arrangement of fruit and vessels. Intense light from the upper left illuminates the vivid hues of the assembled foodstuffs, reflecting off smooth surfaces, casting shadows, and refracting the casement window of the room through the delicate greenish glass of the *berkemeyer*. An elegant knife diagonally balanced on the edge of the table connects the array with the viewer and establishes the illusion of the still life. Along with a thorny branch of golden gooseberries, the overturned silver spoon with a finial in the form of a figure of a Roman centurion direct the eye into the composition. All the fruits and nuts depicted by Claesz were readily available i…