Still Life with Wild Strawberries

In 1705, when Adriaen Coorte painted these berries, the big garden strawberry we buy today did not exist yet. It was bred in France decades later, from two American species. The strawberries a Dutch buyer knew were mostly the small woodland kind, and he heaps them here on a stone slab. The picture is painted on a sheet of paper pasted onto a wooden panel, barely 16 centimetres tall. Each seed is a single dot of white paint. A white strawberry flower rises out of the pile, and light falls only on the top of the slab, so its front edge stands out sharply against the dark. Two berries on a stalk hang over that edge, with the signature beside them. Mrs Edward Speelman gave the panel to the Mauritshuis in 1995, in memory of her husband, who had bought it at a London sale in 1966.