Adriaen Coorte
Dutch Republic · Dutch Golden Age, Still life painting
The story
While the great Dutch still-life painters of the 17th century piled their canvases with lobsters, silver and gleaming glass, a painter in the quiet provincial town of Middelburg, in the far southwest of the Dutch Republic, did almost the opposite. Adriaen Coorte made small, spare panels: a bundle of asparagus on a bare stone ledge, a few wild strawberries, three seashells, lit against a plain dark ground.
Very little is known about his life. He signed and dated pictures between 1683 and 1707, seems to have worked mostly alone and outside the painters' guild, and was so obscure that after his death his name almost disappeared. The paintings survived, often unsigned or given to someone else.
His rediscovery came in the 1950s, when the Dutch art historian Laurens Bol began tracking down and cataloguing the work. An exhibition of about 35 of these small panels in 1958 caused a real stir in the Netherlands. Today a single Coorte still life of asparagus hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the panel no larger than a sheet of writing paper.
