Still life with fountain and garland of flowers and fruit

By 1720 painters liked to argue that their art could do anything sculpture could, and then some. This canvas makes the case out loud. At its centre stands a stone fountain crowned with a carved mask and a scalloped shell, the kind of cool grey masonry a sculptor would claim as his own ground. Houbraken wraps it in everything paint does best: fruit going soft, mushrooms, leaves, and flowers in full open colour. It hangs as the companion to his portrait of the painter Francois Riviere, and the two were meant to be read together, the carved stone answered by living bloom. The flowers carry the older reminder that such freshness does not last, while the fountain's mask keeps staring out, dry-eyed, from the middle of the fruit.