COORTE, Adriaen

Virtually nothing is known about Adriaen Coorte except that he created about one hundred paintings between 1683 and 1707. He apparently lived and worked in Middelburg, the capital of the province of Zeeland in the southern part of the Netherlands, where local collectors acquired many of the artist’s still lifes. He may have been a gentleman “amateur” painter rather than a professional artist, and until the late 1950s his name hardly appeared in discussions of Dutch art. Now, however, Coorte is rightly recognized as a gifted and original master, whose spare and carefully balanced compositions are highly prized.

Coorte’s pictures stand out for their extreme simplicity, loving concentration, and the isolated look of a few vegetables on a plinth bathed in a harsh, unrealistic light. In his own time he had only local fame in Middelburg in Zeeland. He was discovered by the international public only in the mid-twentieth century.

Adriaen Coorte often focused his compositions on discrete elements placed on a stone tabletop. He always imbued his scenes with a haunting timelessness.

This still-life shows three peaches on a stone ledge, with a Red Admiral butterfly. It is signed with monogram lower centre: AC.

Coorte’s still-life paintings are highly distinctive. In his simple designs, natural objects sit upon stone ledges against a dark background. His subject matter is restricted to limited themes: asparagus, wild strawberries, fruit, including peaches, medlars, apricots, black and red currants, cherries, gooseberries and grapes, and lastly nuts and shells. His still-lifes are occasionally accompanied by a delicate butterfly.

Coorte’s known oeuvre consists of about sixty-four paintings. Many of his compositions depict natural objects set on a stone ledge against a dark background. In the oeuvre six other shell still-lifes are recorded, each dated between 1696-1698. They contain a varied assortment of shells which differ quite dramatically in colour and shape. Coorte takes a clinical approach to painting his still-life elements, and thus the shells in the present painting are easily identifiable. From left to right they are: Lambis lambis, Tonna tessellate, Natica or Nerita (?), Cittarium pica, and Cyphoma gibbosum.

Like the paintings themselves, the shells which served as the artist’s subjects were objects of great rarity and desirability, which almost universally shipped from abroad by the Dutch East India and West India companies, and would have been collected for a Kunstkammer with a similar fervors to the paintings which depict them.

The painting is signed and dated lower left: A. Coorte 1696.

Except for the artists who made the exact drawings and watercolours of birds, plants, insects, and shells which were so popular with ‘dilettanti’ of the period, the Dutch tradition of painting unpretentious still-lifes virtually died during the eighteenth century. Adriaen Coorte, a strong individualist who never adopted the rhetoric of his contemporaries, was one of the last practitioners of this intimate category.

The exquisite flowers and fruit, expensive vases and metalware, drapery and linen, and other props found in the over-abundant still-lifes painted during his day hardly ever appear in his work. His inclination was for common, reddish-brown earthenware pots, not imported porcelain bowls. Coorte’s pictures are always tiny, his subjects and compositions modest. His typical motifs are a bunch of asparagus, a few peaches, or three medlars with a butterfly on a bare ledge, like in this picture. Nothing more. Objects and light are studied intensely, and are painted with a wondrous tenderness which awakens more feelings about the mystery of our relation to the animate and inanimate world than the better-known show-pieces of the period.

Coorte is an isolated phenomenon. The main line of eighteenth-century Dutch still-life painting is represented by the Amsterdamers Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum, who both specialized in elaborate flower and fruit pictures.

Many of Coorte’s compositions, like the present one, depict natural objects set on a stone ledge against a dark background. One of his favourite subjects was wild strawberries which he included in no less than eighteen paintings. Sometimes they were combined with other fruits and vegetables, such as gooseberries and asparagus.

The painting is signed and dated lower left: A Coorte/1704