(active in Hanau between 1620 and 1638)
A still life of fruit and flowers with grapes in a wicker basket, blackberries in a porcelain bowl and tulips in a glass vase on the right,
oil on panel, 60 x 83 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection of Hartwig family of industrialists, Berlin;
by descent to an Austrian private collection

The present painting from an old private collection is unpublished. It was unknown to Gerhard Bott, the author of the catalogue raisonné of the works of Isaac Soreau (see: G. Bott, Die Stilllebenmaler Soreau, Binoit, Codino und Marrell in Hanau und Frankfurt 1600–1650, Hanau 2001). The picture is a spectacular example of Soreau’s pre-eminent significance for still life painting in the first half of the 17th century.

After his training in the studio of his father, the still life painter Daniel Soreau (who died in 1619), and several years spent with his relative, Peter Binoit, in Hanau, Isaac Soreau, the twin brother of the painter Peter Soreau, went to Antwerp around 1626. There he worked together with Jacob van Hulsdonck. Fred Meijer assumes that Soreau, who was not a member of the Antwerp guild of painters and was therefore not authorised to sell his pictures under his own name, marketed them under the name of his colleague Van Hulsdonck (see: F. Meijer, The Collection of Dutch and Flemish Paintings Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford/Zwolle 2003, p. 281). This may also account for the fact that only a few signed paintings by Soreau, dating from the years 1626–1638, have survived. Only two dated paintings by Soreau are known (one dated 1638 in the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, and another, dated 1645, in a private collection), so that little can be said about his life and development of his art.

Gerhard Bott (see: G. Bott, op. cit., pp. 88/89) writes about Soreau’s refined compositions: “Isaac Soreau painted a more sumptuous version of the wicker basket combined with a porcelain bowl and a bouquet of flowers as many as three times. The three paintings are identically composed down to the last detail. One painting is on canvas, while the other two are on panel. […] Two of these paintings are preserved in museums – one has been owned by the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore since 1902; a larger version is in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin. The third painting was with the John Mitchell & Son Gallery in London in 1974. The wicker basket containing green and blue grapes and vine leaves, two of which crown the arrangement of grapes at centre, appears in the middle of a table top that occupies almost half of the composition. The basket casts a shadow towards the right, as do the porcelain bowl to its left and the glass vase near the right margin. Like in the signed Schwerin painting from 1638, the blue painted porcelain bowl is filled with blackberries surrounded by blackberry leaves. The fact that Isaac Soreau used the same bowl in several compositions suggests that he was probably the owner of this precious object. The bouquet in the glass vase is identically arranged in all of the three pictures, with a red and yellow tulip sticking out from among the other blossoms. Cherries, grapes, and hazelnuts lie scattered in front of these three items; the red-currant branch on the right derives from the signed painting in Schwerin. In all three pictures, a cockchafer beetle and a butterfly appear in the same positions: the butterfly has landed on one of the vine leaves in the wicker basket, and the beetle sits next to a bunch of grapes in front of it. Only at second glance does one notice that, for example, in the painting in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin the red-currant branch is further away from the wicker basket and the glass vase than in the Baltimore painting. In the painting that appeared on the London art market, the stem of the solitary cherry to the left of the porcelain bowl differs from the stems in the two other versions, as it is less curved. The analysis of these three versions of the same subject matter reveals that it is helpful to compare many individual details when trying to establish Isaac Soreau’s authorship for still lifes. The present case shows that the painter repeatedly referred to a standard repertoire of blossoms, pieces of fruit, and insects. In their repetitions these elements may form links among the different variants […].”

In its balanced composition, the present painting can be related to a further still life by Soreau that was sold at Bonham’s, London, on 4th December 2013 as lot 34. The slightly raised vantage point and the combination of a fruit basket (which the artist borrowed from Caravaggio’s flower basket in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan) with a Chinese bowl and a vase are typical of Soreau’s elegant still lifes.

We are grateful to Fred Meijer of the RKD, The Hague, for confirming the authenticity of the present work by Isaac Soreau on the basis of a high-resolution photograph (private communication, 14th June 2016).