LONDON.- Jan Davidsz. De Heem’s luxurious and immaculately preserved still life will be a highlight of Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 1 July, during Classic Week London (estimate: £3,000,000-5,000,000). This tantalising feast is among the finest paintings by the artist to have appeared on the market in recent decades. It will be on view at Christie’s New York until 21 May, followed by Hong Kong from 25 to 28 May, before returning to London for the pre-sale exhibition from 27 June to 1 July.


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Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s Global Head of the Old Masters Department commented: “This sumptuous work represents the apogee of Dutch Golden Age still-life painting and, in its refined execution, rich yet balanced composition and immaculate condition, it is as perfect an example of the pronk still life as I have come across in many years. We are thrilled to be handling the sale of such a masterpiece this summer in London.”

Described in the recent catalogue raisonné as the seminal work of 1649, this luxurious still life was painted at a time when De Heem produced some of his finest works. The artist masterfully presents the viewer with a cornucopia of objects: a pie on a pewter plate, a partially peeled lemon and overturned silver spoon on a pewter plate, crayfish and shrimp in a Wanli bowl, fruit, a walnut and an oyster on a pewter plate, a basket of fruit, a fluted glass, a silver-gilt cup, a roemer, an overturned silver tazza on a strong box, a silver ewer and a bread roll, all on a partially draped table with a curtain beyond.

His refined execution and the painting’s exceptional state of preservation enable the appreciation of a number of small details cleverly reflected in the metal and glassware. The central boss of the silver-gilt cup shows the reverse of a painting on an easel, while certain still life elements, a candlestick and books on a table can be made out in the mirror-like vacant cartouche of the ewer. The artist himself can also be seen in this cartouche. Additionally, though it has never before been noted in the literature, the windows reflected in the roemer also include a church spire, presumably that of the Cathedral in Antwerp, the city where de Heem was working.

The painting reprises themes from an extraordinary group of four large-scale paintings that de Heem executed earlier in the decade, but with greater refinement of execution, perhaps in part due to its more manageable scale. Two of these paintings are today at the Louvre (inv. no. 1321) and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (inv. no. K 1878/5). A third is in a private collection, and the fourth was sold for a world auction record at Christie’s in London on 15 December 2020. Much like the present painting, the variety of textures and sheer number of expensive foods and objects the artist managed to compose within a relatively tight pictorial space offers the viewer an example of virtually everything de Heem was capable of and perhaps served as a calling card to display the range of his abilities.


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