Woman Taking Fruit from a Bowl of Flowers and Fruit

Two painters made this canvas, and only one of them signed it. At the bottom, in the middle, the inscription reads 'A. Breugel fecit Roma 1669', Brueghel made this in Rome. Abraham Brueghel painted the heaped fruit and flowers. The young woman reaching into the bowl is by another hand, certainly Italian according to the Louvre, which suggests Antonio Gherardi, a painter from Rieti trained in Rome under Pietro da Cortona and then about 25 years old. Francesco Allegrini has been proposed too.

Sharing a canvas this way was Brueghel's habit in Rome, where figure painters such as Carlo Maratta and Giacinto Brandi worked on his still lifes. The woman probably stands for a season, summer or autumn, or perhaps for taste, one of the five senses. The Pereire family, Paris bankers, gave the painting to the Louvre in 1949 and kept the use of it until 1974.