Adriaen Coorte had an ability to endow simple pictorial elements with a sense of grace and poetry, as in this image of a bundle of white asparagus perched at the edge of a stone plinth. The asparagus shoots still have the vigor of live plants, their tips reaching upward and outward, as though striving toward an unseen light source. Recently plucked sprigs of red currants, gracefully resting on the ledge and draped over its side, complement the tightly bunched, long cylindrical forms of the asparagus.
Coorte conveyed the tenderness of the young asparagus shoots and the promised lushness of the currants’ inner core through delicate modeling and subtle nuances of color, but he did so with great restraint. The simplified and idealized shapes of the asparagus and currants give them an enormous presence—something greater than mere morsels to be enjoyed at a meal. Coorte simultaneously emphasized their organic qualities by juxtaposing them against the strongly geometrical shape of the gray stone ledge, in which cracks remind the viewer that life, indeed all matter, is transient.
Depictions of asparagus bunches appear frequently in Coorte’s limited oeuvre. Asparagus and currants were both seasonal delicacies harvested in June and grown in Zeeland, the Dutch province where the artist worked most of his life, and both were valued for their nutritional content and medicinal properties. Coorte probably was drawn to this combination for aesthetic reasons, with the freely draped circular forms of the red fruit visually complementing the tautly bound bunch of asparagus with its subtle green, purple, and white colors.
An X-radiograph [see X-radiographyA photographic or digital image analysis method that visually records an object's ability to absorb or transmit x-rays. The differential absorption pattern is useful for examining an object's internal structure as well as for comparing the variation in pigment types.] of Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants indicates that Coorte left a rectangular-shaped reserve for the bunch of asparagus slightly above the final placement [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] X-radiograph, Adriaen Coorte, Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants, 1696, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, 2002.122.1. He executed the asparagus and red currants with thin glazes [see GlazingApplying transparent layers of paint that influence the colors or tonalities of the layers below.], perhaps following pigment recommendations for painting asparagus that Willem Beurs included in his contemporary treatise. Coorte’s careful, almost naive renderings of these natural forms have no obvious precedent in Dutch art, though they do share qualities with the artistic traditions from the early seventeenth century that Coorte would have found in Middelburg, where he presumably lived and worked for most of his life. As the capital of Zeeland, this prosperous trading center gained much of its wealth from an influx of Flemish émigrés, among them artists such as Ambrosius Bosschaert (Dutch, 1573 - 1621). It also benefited enormously from the presence of the Dutch East and West India Companies, both of which established important regional offices in this well-situated maritime city. Middelburg’s wealthiest citizens adorned their homes with luxury goods from around the world and their gardens with rare bulbs and plants.
Bosschaert and his followers often painted small-scale images of carefully observed flowers and fruit to create a pleasing and uplifting visual experience. The aesthetic appeal of these works was enhanced by the widespread belief that each of these plants revealed God’s infinite power and ingenuity. Although Coorte worked almost a century later and rarely painted flowers, he fully embraced the spirit of Bosschaert’s age, when great virtue was attached to the careful depiction of the natural world.
Old estate inventories indicate that Coorte’s paintings remained largely in Zeeland during the eighteenth century. The prices for them were modest, and their true artistic merit seems not to have been appreciated until the 1950s, when the Dutch art historian Laurens Bol introduced Coorte’s works to a broad public. Bol noted that a number of Coorte’s paintings had been sold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as pendants, and it may well be the case that Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants was paired with another work. When this painting first appeared on the art market in London in 1977, another painting by Coorte of identical dimensions and date, Still Life with a Bowl of Strawberries and Gooseberries, was offered for sale by the same owner [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Adriaen Coorte, Still Life with a Bowl of Strawberries and Gooseberries, 1696, oil on canvas, private collection. As with Coorte’s pairing of asparagus and red currants in the present work, the relationship between the two paintings seems to have been primarily aesthetic in nature. Their complementary compositions of sumptuous delicacies arrayed on facing stone ledges perfectly balance each other through their colors and pictorial structures, as well as through their visual and sensual appeal.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014