Isaak Soreau

Isaak Soreau was born in 1604 in Hanau, a town near Frankfurt built partly by Protestant refugees from the Low Countries, and his family was among them. His father, Daniel Soreau, was a merchant and still-life painter of Flemish descent, and Isaak learned the trade with his twin brother Peter in the family workshop.

Isaak painted quiet table-top still lifes: baskets and dishes of fruit, grapes and peaches and plums, sometimes a few flowers or a scatter of insects, set close to the viewer against a plain dark ground. He and his twin worked so alike that specialists still struggle to tell their hands apart, and many pictures are given to one or the other on a best guess. Little is known of his later life. He is recorded in Frankfurt and seems to disappear from the documents after about 1645.