Still Life with Ostrich Egg Cup and the Whitfield Heirlooms

On a dark tabletop a lidded agate cup with silver mounts stands beside a matching cup overturned to reveal its mother-of-pearl lining, a piece of red coral dangles over the front edge, and the centerpiece — the Whitfield Cup, an ostrich-egg cup created in 1590 by a royal jeweler — rises in gleaming silver-gilt, an heirloom of the family that owned this picture. Pieter Gerritsz. van Roestraeten trained in the Dutch Republic before making his career in London, where he specialized in compositions of luxury goods wrought from rare, imported materials: ostrich eggs, mother-of-pearl, agate, coral and silver. This still life of about 1670 was possibly painted for John Whitfield of Canterbury, whose will mentions just such an ostrich egg cup; it descended in the Whitfield family, passed through sales at Sotheby’s in 1976, at the Hôtel Drouot in 1993 and at Christie’s in 2008, and entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 with the actual Whitfield Cup. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.