Lot Essay
This beautifully-preserved panel is among the largest and most impressive in Balthasar van der Ast’s oeuvre. Van der Ast undertook his artistic training in the workshop of his brother-in-law, the pioneering still life painter Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. Though his earliest still lifes are entirely in the mold of his master, in the course of his career van der Ast broadened the genre’s pictorial language by incorporating a wider variety of objects into his compositions and employing a more diverse and varied number of compositional formats. And, while Bosschaert tended to treat flowers and fruit as discrete subgenres, van der Ast can be credited as a master of the ‘combined’ composition which merged these disparate elements into a coherent whole.
Van der Ast presents a kraak porcelain dish brimming with apples, grapes and other fruit alongside a pewter platter with two quinces, insects and fruit and shells arranged along the front edge of a stone ledge. The basic compositional schema is one that can be found among van der Ast’s earliest works, including a similarly large-scale still life dated 1617 which is today at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire (fig. 1). With its elevated viewpoint, comparatively restrained composition depicting a more limited number of elements and simple black background, the Currier painting fits squarely in the tradition established by Bosschaert. By contrast, the head-on viewpoint, complex composition and carefully articulated background and light effects of the Getty painting mark it as a work of some thirty years later, datable to the second half of the 1640s, by which point the artist had been resident in Delft for more than a decade.
Despite its seeming simplicity, van der Ast has achieved a composition of surpassing visual harmony through carefully calibrated choices. Three yellow quinces, a pair of pink roses and a bunch of red grapes anchor the two corners of the painting’s triangular composition. The prevailing yellows and reds of the central grouping of fruit at center is bookended by bunches of purple and green grapes. The diagonal axis created by the pewter plate and porcelain dish is mirrored by the tendrils of grape leaves running from the upper left background to the lower right foreground. The frieze-like arrangement of the various shells staged along the front edge of the ledge creates a pronounced horizontal plane, while the grasshopper, quince stem and several shells project beyond that space and into the viewer's own.
Each of the painting’s various elements is presented in relative isolation, perhaps a result of van der Ast’s practice of using detailed preparatory studies. This provided the added benefit of affording the painting’s viewer the opportunity to observe and study the individual specimens. Among the shells is a Conus victoriae from western Australia at far right, several varieties of ornate murex shells and, at center, a Mitra mitra which is endemic to the Indo-Pacific and identified by its brilliant orange markings. The Murex motacilla seen immediately to the right of the Mitra mitra reappears in nearly identical fashion in several further paintings by van der Ast datable to 1640 on, including one which is today in an English private collection (fig. 2). The frequent recurrence of similar species of shells across van der Ast’s paintings suggests he, too, may have owned a number of them.
Still life paintings like this provided an opportunity for contemporary viewers to not only revel in the artist’s inimitable mimetic abilities but invited them to contemplate the magnificence of the natural world, often with distinctly Christian overtones. Details like the blemishes which appear on several of the central apples, apricots and peaches; furrowed grape leaves, freshly picked pink roses and buzzing insects all evoke temporal associations which can be connected with the brevity of human life. The costly shells and Chinese porcelain dish likewise would have appeared as exotic elements to van der Ast’s contemporaries and emphasized the success of Dutch overseas exploration and trade, which saw such rare goods flood the country’s ports from distant lands.
Van der Ast presents a kraak porcelain dish brimming with apples, grapes and other fruit alongside a pewter platter with two quinces, insects and fruit and shells arranged along the front edge of a stone ledge. The basic compositional schema is one that can be found among van der Ast’s earliest works, including a similarly large-scale still life dated 1617 which is today at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire (fig. 1). With its elevated viewpoint, comparatively restrained composition depicting a more limited number of elements and simple black background, the Currier painting fits squarely in the tradition established by Bosschaert. By contrast, the head-on viewpoint, complex composition and carefully articulated background and light effects of the Getty painting mark it as a work of some thirty years later, datable to the second half of the 1640s, by which point the artist had been resident in Delft for more than a decade.
Despite its seeming simplicity, van der Ast has achieved a composition of surpassing visual harmony through carefully calibrated choices. Three yellow quinces, a pair of pink roses and a bunch of red grapes anchor the two corners of the painting’s triangular composition. The prevailing yellows and reds of the central grouping of fruit at center is bookended by bunches of purple and green grapes. The diagonal axis created by the pewter plate and porcelain dish is mirrored by the tendrils of grape leaves running from the upper left background to the lower right foreground. The frieze-like arrangement of the various shells staged along the front edge of the ledge creates a pronounced horizontal plane, while the grasshopper, quince stem and several shells project beyond that space and into the viewer's own.
Each of the painting’s various elements is presented in relative isolation, perhaps a result of van der Ast’s practice of using detailed preparatory studies. This provided the added benefit of affording the painting’s viewer the opportunity to observe and study the individual specimens. Among the shells is a Conus victoriae from western Australia at far right, several varieties of ornate murex shells and, at center, a Mitra mitra which is endemic to the Indo-Pacific and identified by its brilliant orange markings. The Murex motacilla seen immediately to the right of the Mitra mitra reappears in nearly identical fashion in several further paintings by van der Ast datable to 1640 on, including one which is today in an English private collection (fig. 2). The frequent recurrence of similar species of shells across van der Ast’s paintings suggests he, too, may have owned a number of them.
Still life paintings like this provided an opportunity for contemporary viewers to not only revel in the artist’s inimitable mimetic abilities but invited them to contemplate the magnificence of the natural world, often with distinctly Christian overtones. Details like the blemishes which appear on several of the central apples, apricots and peaches; furrowed grape leaves, freshly picked pink roses and buzzing insects all evoke temporal associations which can be connected with the brevity of human life. The costly shells and Chinese porcelain dish likewise would have appeared as exotic elements to van der Ast’s contemporaries and emphasized the success of Dutch overseas exploration and trade, which saw such rare goods flood the country’s ports from distant lands.