Still Life with Fruit and Flowers

This garland of fruit and flowers hangs from a blue ribbon against a dark ground, a festoon painted as a subject in its own right. De Heem found the form in Antwerp, where he lived from the mid-1630s. There the Jesuit painter Daniel Seghers had made his name with wreaths of flowers around images of saints, and de Heem came into contact with him, worked with him on some pictures and borrowed the garland. The museum dates this canvas only broadly, between about 1650 and de Heem's death in 1684. That span covers a restless stretch of his life. In 1667 he moved back to Utrecht, the city of his youth, and in 1672, after French troops occupied Utrecht, he returned to Antwerp, where he spent his last years.