Lot 54: ADRIAEN COORTE

STILL LIFE OF STRAWBERRIES IN AN EARTHENWARE BOWL, ON A STONE LEDGE
signed lower centre: A , Coorte

26.5 by 20.4 cm.

oil on paper laid down on panel

Q. Buvelot, 'Toevoegingen aan het oeuvre van Adriaen Coorte (werkzaam c.1683-1707)', in Oud Holland (forthcoming).

Possibly Daniël Schorer, clerk at the court of Flanders, Middelburg;
Possibly his sale, Middelburg, 15 April 1771, either no. 49 or 50: 'A. Coorte. Een fraay Fruytstukje 10½ [x] 8 [duim = 26.2 x 20 cm]' and 'Een dito niet minder als 't voorgaande, zynde een weerga 10½ [x] 8 [duim = 26.2 x 20 cm]';
In the family of the present owner for at least a 100 years.

We are grateful to Quentin Buvelot, senior curator at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, for writing the following note:

Little is known on Coorte's life, but we do know that he was active in the period 1683-1707. Since his earliest dated paintings were made in 1683, it may be assumed that the artist was born between 1660 and 1665. He worked in the Zeeland town of Middelburg, but seems not to have been a member of the Guild there.

For a long time, Coorte's name was known only to a small group of art lovers and collectors. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his name slid into near-oblivion and his work fetched only modest prices at auction. The recent revival in appreciation for Coorte was initiated by Laurens J. Bol (1898-1994), during his term as director of the Dordrechts Museum. Due to his monographic exhibition held in 1958 and the publication in 1977 of his oeuvre catalogue, Coorte's name became widely known.

Nowadays, Adriaen Coorte's popularity appears to have been generated in part by the modesty that characterises most of his work, this is not only reflected in his paintings' simple subjects, but also in their generally small size. Certain specific motifs constantly recur in Coorte's restrained, intimate compositions. His characteristic works show us a stone table with one or more kinds of vegetables or fruit, or shells and nuts. These motifs, which are rendered in meticulous detail, are always set against a dark background. A hard, bright and wonderfully elaborated illumination spreads an unrealistic, almost magical sheen over his carefully structured still lifes. The edges of the stone table stand out sharply, frequently with a clear-cut joint and minor cracks or damage.

Over 60 signed paintings by him are known today, almost all of which are dated. (1 )The present and following lot are welcome additions, as they came only to light a few months ago and were completely unknown. However, they can possibly be connected with a sale in 1771 (see Provenance). (2) The present lot is signed but undated. However, it is compositionally so similar to that of a recently discovered painting from 1693, Still life with a spray of gooseberries, (3 )that it seems justifiable to assign it to this period. Strawberries were one of Coorte's favourite subjects. The strawberries depicted here belong to a wild species, Fragaria vesca. This is rather a misleading name, since this 'wild strawberry' was actually the standard type under cultivation in the painter's day. The painter has depicted the fruit in various ways, a few times in the form of separate fruit, but more frequently in a small earthenware bowl. The 1696 still life with strawberries in an earthenware bowl is the earliest dated example (private collection, now on loan to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), the last dated one being a painting from 1704. A dozen paintings in total depict a small bowl of strawberries, half of which feature it as the primary motif as here (fig. 1). Even the simplest of households had earthenware bowls of this kind, and frequently used them as fruit-bowls. (4)

One may assume Coorte used the contemporary literature written for painters. In a unique textbook that was published in 1692, the painter Wilhelmus Beurs (1656-after 1700) described at length how to paint certain fruit and vegetables. (5 )The strawberries painted by Coorte illustrate Beurs's text perfectly. For instance, when describing the right way to depict gooseberries, the author dwells on the characteristic fine hairs and little veins on the fruit, which are difficult to display 'unless someone undertook to paint only a few white gooseberries from close by, out of curiosity'. These words seem to encapsulate precisely what Coorte sought to achieve in his rendering of fruit, in this case strawberries. To convey the different surface structures as convincingly as possible, he frequently depicted his motifs from very close by. He had a special way of rendering the yellow seeds of strawberries, by applying dots of white lead and lead-tin yellow. Beurs writes aptly of 'perfectly ripe strawberries' in which the painter must 'depict the shine on each individual seed'.


1. See Q. Buvelot, The still lifes of Adriaen Coorte (active c.1683-1707) with oeuvre catalogue, exhibition catalogue, Zwolle 2008.
2. See L.J. Bol, Adriaen Coorte: A Unique Late Seventeenth Century Dutch Still-Life Painter, Assen 1977, p. 32; Buvelot, op.cit, p. 120;
3. Buvelot, op.cit., p. 88, cat. no. 12, reproduced.
4. op.cit., pp. 32-42, reproduced.
5. W. Beurs, De groote waereld in 't kleen geschildert, Amsterdam 1692, pp. 130-144, 152-153.