Adriaen Coorte

ADRIAEN COORTE Active in or around Middelburg 1683-1707 Tantalizingly little is known about Adriaen Coorte, one of the most original still life painters of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He may have been born around 1665. His earliest dated painting is the Pelican and ducks in a mountain landscape of 1683 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), which replicates several birds from a work by Melchior de Hondecoeter (1636-1695). This suggests that Coorte was apprenticed in Amsterdam, where the family name Coorte appears in records. Sixty signed paintings by him are known, all but eight of which are dated. He was active between 1683 and 1707. Coorte probably worked in the vicinity of Middelburg, or in that town, where in 1695/6 he was fined one pound (about six guilders) because he had offered paintings for sale without being a member of the local guild. Many of his works are recorded in sales of eighteenth-century Middelburg collections, for example that of the Burgomaster Jean Walran Sandra in 1713. Coorte specialized in small still-lifes of fruit, vegetables, flowers, nuts and shells, either in oil on canvas or oil on paper laid down on canvas. He chose a restricted number of elements, usually on a stone table set against a dark background. Medlars, grapes, strawberries, strawberry flowers and asparagus are favourite subjects. The simplicity, sensitivity to light and air of quiet mystery about Coorte’s compositions have appealed greatly to modern sensibility since his ‘rediscovery’ by Laurens Bol in the 1950s. The work of Adriaen Coorte is represented in the Zeeuws Museum, Middelburg; the Mauritshuis, The Hague; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Dordrechts Museum; the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel; the Kurpfälziches Museum, Heidelberg; the Szépmüvézeti Múzeum, Budapest; the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Cleveland Museum of Art.