Still Life with Asparagus (Adriaen Coorte, 1697)

Dear Readers, the art of ‘still life’ was surely at its most extraordinary during the Dutch Golden Age, an era that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning about from Benjamin Moser’s extraordinary book ‘The Upside World – Meetings with the Dutch Masters’. Earlier this week, I did a post on the animal painter Paulus Potter, but I couldn’t leave the subject without a quick look at the work of Adriaen Coorte (roughly 1697 – 1707). Still Life as a genre demands a kind of calm contemplation – in the book, Moser makes an interesting comparison with the contemporaneous Japanese poet Bashō, whose haikus demand a similar level of stillness. Take this one, for example…

A field of cotton–
as if the moon
had flowered.

or this one…

Awake at night–
the sound of the water jar
cracking in the cold.

For both the painter and the poet, I sense a need to capture a precise moment in time, perfectly. Moser describes how Coorte

“..fiddled about with what looks like the same bunch of asparagus – zooming in and out, toying with the lighting, adding, and then removind, a few currants; now trying them in combination with an artichoke, now with a bunch of strawberries – for no less than eighteen years”. 

Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants (Adriaen Coorte, 1696)

Still life with asparagus, a spray of gooseberries and a bowl of strawberries
(Adriaen Coorte, 1698)

We know so little about the artist, except what he’s left us in his paintings. What do they tell us? The man was a perfectionist, for sure, struggling again and again to get his pictures right. He was an observer of the fall of light on the most ordinary of objects – a peach, a grape, a wooden bowl.  His masterpiece, described as “the Mona Lisa of the late seventeenth century Dutch still-life art” by art historian Laurens-Jan Bols, is the picture below, ‘Three Medlars with a Butterfly’ (1705)

“Three Medlars with a Butterfly” (Adriaen Coorte, 1705)

Moser describes the painting thus.

“It is hard to say exactly what makes this painting so perfect. A centimetre higher and the butterfly would seem detached from the rest of the scene, unrelated to the medlars, floating past them irrelevantly. Half an inch lower, it would be crashing in to them. As Coorte has placed it, the butterfly is wafting gently toward the fruit, enhancing, not disturbing, the tranquillity of the scene”.

As I look at these paintings, I find myself both mesmerised by their stillness, and held in a place beyond rational thought. They fill me with both melancholy at the inevitable passing of time, and a sense of wonder at how perfect a butterfly, a stalk of asparagus or a medlar can be for just a few moments. In the pictures below I can almost smell the strawberries, feel the furriness of the peaches, even as some of the strawberries are starting to rot.

Still Life with Wild Strawberries (Adriaen Coorte, 1696)

Three Peaches and a Butterfly (Adriaen Coorte, 1693-95)

Many still life painters incorporated a ‘memento mori’ into their works, such as a spider catching a fly or a lizard hunting a butterfly. Coorte was much more subtle than this: he allows us to feel what we feel without directing us. Moser concludes his book with this statement:

“Adriaen Coorte, like Bashō, sought ‘a vision of eternity in the things that are, by their own nature, destined to perish”.

Maybe that’s what makes these painting both glorious and melancholy. What a feast.

“Still Life with Shells” (Adriaen Coorte, 1697)