Cartouche with fruit and flowers and wine glass

This 1680 panel painting in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin represents de Heem very late in his career — he would die around 1684 — when he was working in a cartouche format that combined floral and fruit arrangements within an architectural or decorative frame. Cartouche compositions reflect the Baroque taste for decorative integration of painting within architectural programs, and de Heem's adoption of this format suggests commissions from patrons who wanted paintings designed to fit within specific decorative schemes. The Gemäldegalerie's holdings span the full range of Dutch and Flemish Golden Age painting, and de Heem's work appears there alongside other masters of still life. The wine glass included in this composition signals a continuation of his classic combination of organic and manufactured luxury objects into his ninth decade of life.

The cartouche format — a decorative frame containing the central still-life arrangement — imposes a different compositional logic from de Heem's standard table-top works. The boundaries of the composition are defined by the cartouche's edges rather than by a horizontal surface, requiring the arrangement to fill an ornamental shape. His late technique retains the quality of his mature years, the glazes still luminous and the individual forms still convincingly rendered.