Still Life with a Split Artichoke, Fruit in Kraak Porcelain Ware and a Salt Cellar/Pepper Castor

c. 1605 - c. 1615

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 46.4 cm × width 79.3 cm × height 46.5 cm × width 79 cm
outer size: depth 7.2 cm (support incl. frame)

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype / L. Nijkamp, RMA, 13 October 2006
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 31 August 2007

Provenance

…; collection Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), The Hague; from whom on loan to the museum, 1907-11 (SK-C-814); donated to the museum from his estate, 1912

Object number: SK-A-2549

Credit line: Gift of the heirs of C. Hoogendijk, The Hague

The artist

Osias Beert I ((?) Antwerp c. 1580 - Antwerp 1623/24)

Not much of a biography can be provided for the flower and still-life painter Osias Beert I, whose eminence was recognized in the modern era only in 1894.¹ The first, published reference to him is his registration in the records of the Antwerp guild of St Luke as an apprentice to ‘Andris van Baseroo’ (i.e. Andries van Baesrode) in 1596.² He became a master in the guild six years later,³ from which can be calculated his approximate date of birth. Next to nothing is known of Van Baesrode’s work, but he may have been a flower painter.⁴ Beert’s mortuary debt was paid in the guild accounting year 1623/24.⁵ In all, six apprentices were registered as having enrolled in his studio, the first in 1605/06 may have been related to Maria Ykens whom he married in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk on 8 January 1606.⁶ The frequency of registration increased from 1615 suggesting that the capacity of his studio had grown. In 1622 he was living in the Koning van Mooren on the Gevangenisbrug.⁷

Beert – or Beet as his name was also spelt – rarely signed and never dated any of his extant paintings; a small number were executed on copper supports prepared by Pieter Staes and dated between 1607 and 1609, which provides a terminus post quem for their execution. Greindl in 1983 listed twelve signed paintings and eighty which can reasonably be attributed to him.⁸ Evidence of his contemporary popularity can be found in a number of early copies or derivations, as well as in the fact that he was selected to introduce the mass of blooms in the Pausias and Glycera executed by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and his studio circa 1618.⁹ It may, however, have been the degree of studio participation in the execution of the figures that determined the substitution of Beert in the place of the better-known Jan Brueghel I who would normally have collaborated with Rubens if he alone had been responsible for the figures. Further, as Greindl has pointed out, a table-top still life, most likely the work of Osias Beert I, is depicted by Frans Francken II (see below) in his Gallery Interior in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, dated 1610-15 by Härting.¹⁰ But Beert’s no more than moderate success as an artist is shown by the facts that only two paintings by him are listed in the seventeenth-century Antwerp inventories published by Duverger¹¹ and that none of his works is itemized in the published accounts of Antwerp dealers of the period.

In the circumstances, and in spite of the precious objects sometimes depicted by him in his art indicating prosperous clientele, it may come as no surprise that Beert was also listed as a dealer in cork.¹²

Works by his homonymous son (1622-1678) are hardly known; Greindl records a Still Life, dated 1650, which was sold in London (Christie’s), 12 October 1956, no. 26;¹³ his wife was paid 113 guilders and 15 stuivers for a set of Five Senses which he had painted for the rich widow of an auctioneer and silk merchant, Suzanna Willemssen (d. 1657).¹⁴

REFERENCES
E. Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au XVIIe siècle, Sterrebeek 1983 [ed. princ. 1956], pp. 22-36 and pp. 335-71

Entry

Like other related compositions by Osias Beert I, this painting has in the past been attributed to Louise Moillon (1610-1696) and to Georg Flegel (1566-1638).¹⁵ Its attribution to Beert was due to Benedict in 1938, who stated that it was the the most beautiful non-signed replica (plus belle réplique non signé) of a work in a private collection, Paris, which was signed with his initials.¹⁶ That painting was identified as being with the Galerie Mestrallet in 1938 by Greindl in her list of signed works by Beert.¹⁷ She also accepted as autograph another replica in a Belgian private collection which is slightly larger than the present picture.¹⁸

Benedict already listed variants in 1938: with the dealer P. de Boer, Amsterdam, in the museums at Kassel and St Omer¹⁹ and in a private collection in Paris. In his 1996 catalogue of the Kassel Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Schnackenburg accepted the Rijksmuseum picture as the prototype.²⁰ Meijer had also accepted it in 1994.²¹ But whether it is Beert’s prime original would depend on examination of the Mestrallet version and that referred to as in a Belgian private collection by Greindl in 1983.

Many of the motifs appear in other table top still lifes by Beert; for instance the cluster of three cherries, the stem of the wild strawberries with the knife and the bowls of cherries and strawberries occur in the Still Life of Cherries and Strawberries in Porcelain Bowls at Berlin;²² the bread, diagonally placed, was a favourite motif of his.

The fruit is contained in three Kraak porcelain pieces, products of the reign of the Chinese Emperor Wanli (1573-1619). Rinaldi has identified the wild strawberries as placed in a flat-rimmed dish, the mulberries in a bell (or crow) cup and the cherries in a klapmuts.²³ No similar decorative motifs are found in Rinaldi’s survey, but that on the rim of the bowl of strawberries, of equidistant flower sprigs, can perhaps be dated circa 1580-1600 by analogy with her ‘Border III’.²⁴ The bell cup is, according to Rinaldi, a rare type perhaps to be dated from circa 1620-35;²⁵ if such a dating is correct, it would rule out the presence of the object here because the painting was probably executed fairly early in the century as is argued below. It may be that the object is a ‘crow cup’ (c. 1595-1645), which seems to have been slightly larger than a bell cup;²⁶ however, the decoration of a flower spray in an ogival panel seems more akin to that on a differently shaped category of bowl of circa 1575-1600.²⁷

The knife is probably a ‘Whitsun knife’; Marquardt illustrates an example described as probably German of the second half of the sixteenth century, whose handle is decorated with scales of dark horn and natural coloured mother-of-pearl.²⁸ The handle of that in the present picture is more elaborate. Similar knives appear in still lifes by Pieter Claesz executed in Haarlem in the 1620s.²⁹ The wine glass is façon de Venise, while the vessel on the right is a typical rummer.

Unusual is the silver object on the left seemingly found only in still lifes by Beert. It has been described both as a sugar bowl³⁰ and as a salt cellar, but is in fact a salt cellar topped by a pepper castor, and quite different to the rectangular shaped salt cellars depicted, for instance, by the Antwerp-based Clara Peeters (active 1607-after 1634; see biography under SK-A-2111) in her 1608/09 Still Life of Oysters, Bread and a Salt.³¹ In Beert’s art it would also function as an egg ‘cup’,³² in which the egg replaced the lid with the pepper castor and rested in the salt.

The design of the object derived from the series of engravings of vessels published by Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527-c. 1607) in 1563; the engraving of one is entitled: ‘A vessel whose upper part will furnish pepper and whose lower part in truth salt’, another ‘a vessel whose lower part carried salt and upper part pepper’.³³ Fuhring states that there is no extant object that can be related to the designs in the Vessels series;³⁴ however, Baudouin, Colman and Goethals describe silversmiths’ development of the De Vries design in a way which seems not dissimilar to the object depicted by Beert, but without any specific reference.³⁵ Indeed a simplified version of the design and without the top is depicted by Frans Snijders (1579-1657) in his banquet still life at Dublin, dated by Oldfeld and Robels to the late 1620s³⁶ and is also found on the table at which the Prodigal Son feasts with a lady of easy virtue in the decoration by Frans Francken III (1607-1667) of the wing of a painted cabinet showing the story of the Prodigal Son (BK-NM-4190).

In the absence of any dated extant work by Beert, other factors have to be brought to bear in suggesting a date for the Rijksmuseum still life. The view point is relatively high – not as high as the Still Life with Dives and Lazarus in which the background scene depends on a print executed before 1611,³⁷ but higher than in the still life painted on a copper stamped by Pieter Staes and dated 1607.³⁸ Two other reasons suggest a date of execution from around or after the middle of the first decade of the century. A likely influence on Beert’s formulation is the Still Life with Artichokes by Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) dated by Segal to around 1600 and by Biesboer to circa 1605.³⁹ In this work, the split artichokes, the bread, the knife and cup of mulberries make an early appearance. De Gheyn’s influence is predicated on Biesboer’s description of him as ‘an important precursor … [who] may have visited Antwerp on several occasions’. The second reason is the inconsistent viewpoints here adopted: the top of the salt cellar is seen from a higher viewpoint than the bulbous body, as is the bowl of wild strawberries in relation to the bowl of cherries. By analogy, both Taylor⁴⁰ and Meijer⁴¹ consider the inexact perspective adopted by Ambrosius Bosschaert I (1573-1621) in the rendering of the base of the vase in the Ashmolean Still Life of Flowers as a ‘mistake [which he] often made in his early work’.⁴² However, it has to be said that Beert may simply have been following the example of De Vries, who could deliberately adopt two viewpoints to show his designs, as he did with the inner and outer sides of the tazza engraved by Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570).⁴³

A final consideration concerning a dating of the Rijksmuseum painting is the general availability in Antwerp of Kraak porcelain, imported into the northern Netherlands by the VOC from 1602.⁴⁴ A bowl was depicted by Clara Peeters in a still life of 1611,⁴⁵ and it is unlikely that Osias Beert anticipated her by more than a few years if at all.

The prominent fly (blue-bottle) on the artichoke is a traditional vanitas symbol.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

E. Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au XVIIe siècle, Sterrebeek 1983 [ed. princ. 1956], p. 336

Collection catalogues

1912, p. 379, no. 1634A (as Louyse Moillon); 1934, p. 194, no. 1634A (as Louyse Moillon, at present attributed to Georg Flegel, whose monogram is on the knife); 1960, p. 34, no. 457 D1 (as Osias Beert, attribution); 1976, p. 107, no. A 2549 (attributed to Osias Beert)

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Osias (I) Beert, Still Life with a Split Artichoke, Fruit in Kraak Porcelain Ware and a Salt Cellar/Pepper Castor, c. 1605 - c. 1615', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5968

(accessed 19 September 2024 23:27:51).