Still Life with Five Apricots

For most of the 20th century this small canvas belonged to one family from Middelburg, the Zeeland town where Coorte himself worked. The museum thinks it was most probably bought by Jan Adriaan Frederiks, a Middelburg architect who moved to The Hague in 1907. It then passed to his son Johan Willem Frederiks, a lawyer and collector who wrote a four-volume study of Dutch silver and kept the picture until his death in 1962. In 2006 it came to the Mauritshuis as an anonymous gift. The canvas is only 30 centimetres tall. Four apricots crowd together at the left and a fifth sits apart, with a leafy twig from an apricot tree between them. Coorte caught the edges of the crumpled leaves with small touches of white. The stone slab is made of two blocks, the joint between them running down just right of centre, and the signature with the date 1704 sits below, at the bottom centre.