Still Life with Chinese Vase, Hazelnuts and Orange

A covered jar of Chinese porcelain stands on a stone tabletop with a few hazelnuts and an orange. The jar is Ming porcelain, the kind that reached Amsterdam in the ships of the Dutch East India Company, and the fruit had come a long way too. It is a horned sour orange, a variety used to make liqueur. Against the dark background the blue and white of the porcelain and the orange peel carry the whole picture.

Luttichuys painted it in Amsterdam around 1650 to 1660, and it is one of his plainer still lifes, a few objects rather than a heaped display. In the 20th century it belonged to Hendricus Petrus Bremmer, the Hague art teacher who advised the collector Helene Kröller-Müller. In 2019 the Dutch state accepted the panel in lieu of inheritance tax, and it now hangs in the Mauritshuis.