The Fruit Shop

In 1618 the Southern Netherlands were nine years into a truce with the Dutch Republic, and in Brussels a royal tax collector, Jacques van Ophem, was fitting out a new mansion. He ordered four huge shop scenes from Frans Snyders in Antwerp: game, vegetables, fish and this one, fruit. The work ran until 1621, the year the truce expired. The Hermitage treats the stalls as the painter's invention and suggests the set could stand for the four elements, with fruit for the sun that ripens it. This is the brightest of the four, held together by one golden tone. At the left a saleswoman lifts a fruit from her dish for a customer in a black cloak and a white ruff. The museum names a second painter, Jan Wildens, for the landscape. The four canvases later hung at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the house of Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister, and reached Saint Petersburg when Catherine the Great bought the Walpole collection in 1779.