Still Life with Wild Strawberries

We present today's painting thanks to our favorite Mauritshuis! <3 We are jointly preparing something special for you, but hush for now, you will find out about everything in mid July! :)

The Still Life with Wild Strawberries by Adriaen Coorte is a miracle of simplicity. It is very small—only slightly larger than a postcard—and extremely simple in design. Strawberries are piled up on a stone plinth in haphazard array, with two of them hanging over the edge and a single white flower rising up from their midst. Coorte added subtle refinements to this simple arrangement by illuminating the fruit from above, causing the red strawberries and the white flower to stand out brightly against the dark background. The fruit looks real enough to eat. The small white dots on the red strawberries give them their characteristic texture. Little is known of Coorte’s life, not even the years of his birth and death. On the basis of his dated paintings, we may deduce that he was active in the period 1683–1707, probably in Middelburg.

Coorte specialised in still lifes. We now know about sixty-five paintings by his hand, but once in a while a work that was presumed lost resurfaces. Coorte’s compositions contain elements that occur again and again: for example, a stone plinth or tabletop with one kind of fruit or vegetable or different kinds of shells piled up on it, invariably seen against a dark background. Like many of Coorte’s works, this small still life is painted on paper glued to a panel. No other artist of his day painted high quality still lifes of such humble subjects.

P.S. Not only strawberries were painted by the Old Masters - find beautiful depictions of asparagus here :)

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