Vegetables and a Basket of Fruit on a Table

In the spring of 1880 Prince Paul Demidoff, heir to a Russian fortune made in Ural iron and copper, emptied the villa of San Donato outside Florence, where his uncle Anatole had assembled a vast collection. The sale ran from 15 March to 10 April. Lot 1050 was this table of vegetables and fruit, catalogued as the work of Willem Kalf, a Dutch still-life painter of the next generation who, before his glass and silver pieces, had painted kitchen corners piled with vegetables.

A Bostonian, Stanton Blake, bought it at the sale. When he died in 1889, the museum acquired the picture under the terms of his will.

The museum now catalogues the canvas as attributed to Frans Snyders, the Antwerp still-life painter of the generation before Kalf.