Fruit Still Life

Cornelis de Heem signed this canvas in capitals on a stone ledge at the left, C. DE HEEM. The museum dates it to around 1670, the years when he had left Antwerp to work in the Dutch Republic.

Its later history runs through the beginnings of Dutch public museums. In 1800 the painting was listed in the Nationale Konst-Gallery, the country's first national art museum, which opened that year in the Huis ten Bosch palace in The Hague with pictures from the stadholders' collections. In 1805 that museum moved into the Prince William V Gallery on the Buitenhof, and in 1808 it left for Amsterdam, where it grew into the Rijksmuseum. After 1822 the still life came to the Mauritshuis, which had it on loan to the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage until 2013. The Mauritshuis owns it, and it now hangs in that same gallery on the Buitenhof.