Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and a Bunch of Asparagus

Plums, peaches and cherries fill a shallow wicker basket set at the edge of a table, a bunch of asparagus lying beside it and one stem propped upright against the basket’s rim — each fruit placed with the elegant clarity and stillness that marked French still life at the moment it became an independent genre. Louise Moillon, who trained in her family’s workshop in Paris, painted and inscribed the panel in 1630, at the age of twenty, already an accomplished master of the bodegón-like simplicity that makes her one of the most admired women painters of the seventeenth century. The picture was in the collection of Gertrude D. Webster before Kleinberger sold it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948 through the Wirt D. Walker Fund. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.