Abraham Brueghel (Antwerp 1631 - Naples 1697) Still Life with Fruit

Lot description

Still Life with Fruit, oil on canvas, 71 x 97 cm - framed, 86.5 x 112.5 cm. The following is an excerpt from the report by Professor Alberto Cottino, Turin, November 9, 2025: The canvas depicts "a glass basin with peaches, plums, and jasmine flowers placed outdoors on the edge of a rocky ridge, seen against the light. At the foot of the ridge are bunches of white and black grapes, figs, pumpkin, watermelon, pomegranates, more peaches, and plums. In the background is a mountain, its summit covered by a cloud that, in my opinion, could allude to Mount Vesuvius erupting." "This is, in fact, an autograph variant of remarkable quality from the painting I published in my monograph on Abraham Brueghel (no. 99, p. 146)... the fundamental difference is the presence of a split watermelon in the background instead of the metal vase filled with flowers." “The painting studied here must be considered an important rediscovery, as it was previously known only from an old black-and-white photograph (Sotheby's auction, 1981)…”. “The fruits are depicted with great naturalistic meticulousness, typical of the Flemish painter who – despite his full commitment to Italian Baroque culture – never completely abandoned the descriptive and ‘optical’ approach to nature typical of his native culture”. “It is a work of the highest quality, dating from the painter's Neapolitan period… we know that there was a dramatic eruption of Vesuvius in 1682, and it is possible that the painter may be alluding to that event”. “In a painting like the one studied here, one clearly sees the fluidity and freshness of color that the eighteenth-century Neapolitan biographer Bernardo De Dominici aptly describes in reference to Brueghel's Neapolitan works”. “It is precisely in paintings like the one analyzed here that one can legitimately discern the exquisite, inimitable synthesis between Flemish naturalism and Italian Baroque taste that would make Abraham Brueghel one of the great European exponents of the still life genre in the second half of the seventeenth century.” A. Cottino, Abraham Brueghel 1631-1697. A Master of Still Life between Antwerp, Rome, and Naples, Foligno 2023, p. 145 n 97 B. De Dominici, Lives of the Neapolitan Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Naples, 1742-45, III, p. 442