Still Life with a Hanging Bunch of Grapes, Two Medlars, and a Butterfly

A bunch of green grapes hangs against a black ground, a single leaf and a curling vine above it, two small russet medlars resting on a bare table below, a blue butterfly hovering at the left and a ladybug at the table’s edge — a composition reduced to a few objects and lit with absolute clarity. Adriaen Coorte, a reclusive painter active at Middelburg around 1683 to 1707, signed and dated the small canvas 1687 on the table, and his spare, luminous still lifes, long forgotten, won their modern fame as among the purest statements of Dutch still-life painting. The picture was probably in the collection of the Offenbach connoisseur Johann Anton André by 1838 and surfaced again in the London trade in the twentieth century before the National Gallery of Art purchased it in 2020 through the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.