Flowers and Fruit in a Porcelain Bowl

Flowers and fruit rise from a prized porcelain bowl, each petal and leaf picked out with a precise, sensuous touch against a dark ground — the raking light and sumptuous handling of the finest Spanish still-life painting of the seventeenth century. Long assumed to be the work of Francisco de Zurbarán, the leading painter of Seville, the canvas is now recognized as his son Juan’s, who specialized in exquisitely painted still lifes during a short career identified by only a few signed works; the expensive imported Chinese porcelain would have appealed to the wealthy Sevillian clientele for whom such compositions were made. The picture was in the Madrid collection of José de Madrazo by 1856, passed to the Marqués de Salamanca in 1861, and was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947 through the Wirt D. Walker Fund. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.