Lot 32: PIETER GERRITSZ. VAN ROESTRAETEN

PIETER GERRITSZ. VAN ROESTRAETEN HAARLEM 1630 - 1700 LONDON A STILL LIFE OF A YIXANG METAL-MOUNTED TEAPOT ON A STONE LEDGE WITH EIGHT CHINESE EXPORT PIECES INCLUDING THREE CUPS AND SAUCERS, TWO BOWLS AND TWO SPOONS, ALL ON A MARBLE TABLE Oil on canvas 40 by 61 cm.; 15 3/4 by 24 in.

L.B. Shaw, 'Pieter van Roestraten and the English vanitas' in The Burlington Magazine, June 1990, pp. 403, fig. 19.

With Galerie Heinz Gerhard Fein, Heidelberg (according to a label on the reverse);
With P. De Boer, Amsterdam, from whom purchased by the present owners in 1987.

Roestraeten was a pupil of Frans Hals, whose daughter he married in Amsterdam in 1654. He must have been in London little more than a decade later, however, since Arnold Houbraken recorded that Roestraeten suffered a hip injury during the Great Fire of London of 1666. Finding himself among patrons for whom portraiture was almost the only genre of consistent appeal, he caught and sustained the interest of aristocratic patrons by transposing the traditional iconography of the still-life into compositions of the fashionable objects with which they surrounded themselves. In this charming picture of tea things, Roestraeten, encapsulates not only his skill as an artist but also a ritual of everyday aristocratic life with which his patrons could associate.