Banquet Still Life

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 1894.² 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 1596.³ He became a master in the guild six years later,⁴ 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.⁵ Beert’s mortuary debt was paid in the guild accounting year 1623/24.⁶ 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 1606.⁷ 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.⁸

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.⁹ 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 1618.¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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 Duverger¹² 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.¹³

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;¹⁴ 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).¹⁵

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