Dishes with Oysters, Fruit, and Wine

Eleven glistening oysters on the half-shell lie on an iron-gray pewter plate beside a Wan-Li porcelain bowl piled with breads and gold-leafed sweets, while raisins, figs and almonds spill from Ming bowls, candied almonds and cinnamon glow in a pedestal tazza, round wooden boxes of quince paste are stacked at the right, and facon de Venise glasses of red and white wine catch the light — a banquet frozen on a dark wooden tabletop. Osias Beert the Elder, the Antwerp painter who helped found the Flemish still-life tradition around 1600, composed his tabletop feasts from a high vantage point so that no object overlaps another, and no contemporary surpassed him in rendering the sheen of an oyster or the transparency of glass. This panel, dated to about 1620/1624, was in a private Swedish collection from 1952 before passing through the London trade and being purchased by the National Gallery of Art in 1995 with the Patrons’ Permanent Fund. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.