Old Masters & 19th Century Art

We would like to thank Mr. Fred Meijer for his kind assistance in researching and cataloguing the present lot.

Provenance:

Newman Galleries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Collection of Marguerite Harris Morrison (1912-2003), Media, Pennsylvania

Bequeathed from the above in 2003 (as 'Jan Pauwel Gillemans')

Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (never officially accessioned).

Lot Note:

This sumptuous still life, with its lobster, gleaming silverware, and scattered musical instruments, epitomizes the opulent pronkstilleven tradition developed in Antwerp during the mid-seventeenth century. The painting was long attributed to Jan Pauwel Gillemans due to its close resemblance to other Gillemans’s known works, such as the Großes Stilleben in the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, and the very similar composition sold at Christie’s in 2012 (Pronk Still Life with Fruit and a Lobster, Christie’s London, 3–4 July 2012, lot 152), further contributed to this attribution.

Recent scholarship led by Professor Fred Meijer, however, considers the signature and date spurious and instead supports a reattribution to Andries de Coninck, an Antwerp still-life painter active between 1643 and 1659, whose work was deeply indebted to Jan Davidsz. de Heem. According to Professor Meijer, de Coninck was among the first Antwerp painters to translate de Heem’s large and luxurious still lifes of the early 1640s into more intimate yet densely arranged compositions, as seen here. The present lot clearly adopts the artist’s characteristic restrained palette and compositional device centered around the eye-catching lobster perched atop a wicker basket, echoing the soft illumination of the surrounding fruit and glass, and adding to the sense of quiet grandeur set by the classical architectural backdrop. The painting also reveals de Coninck’s fascination with the sensuous tactility of objects: the gleaming goblet half-filled with wine, the curling sheet of music beside the lute, and the cascade of grapes and lemons spilling toward the viewer. 

Yet amid this splendor, the overturned glass, the drooping vine, and the fading light betray a meditation on the fleeting nature of pleasure and possession. In its union of opulence and transience, the painting transforms luxury into allegory: a banquet poised on the edge of silence, where abundance itself becomes a reminder of time’s inevitable decay.