Basket of Fruits

A wicker basket of fruit is propped between two blue-and-white Wan-Li porcelain plates, the grapes, apples, plums, apricots, an orange, a quince, cherries and medlars spilling out around it across a grey stone ledge and lit from the left, so that every piece casts its own small shadow. Balthasar van der Ast (1593/1594–1657) trained with his brother-in-law Ambrosius Bosschaert, the finest flower painter of the day, and took from him the habit of building a composition from studies made after life — but he softened his master’s crisp outlines, muted the colour and drew the eye to the centre of the arrangement, as he does here. The panel, painted about 1622 and signed at the lower right, belongs to a pair of basket still lifes recorded by 1632 in the collection of Amalia van Solms, princess of Orange; its companion Basket of Flowers remains in the same museum. It is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.