Fruit and Flowers

A work catalogued as 'Fruit and Flowers' by Jan Davidsz de Heem with a date of 1785 presents an immediate problem: de Heem died around 1684, making a 1785 date impossible for the master himself. This work is therefore either a copy after de Heem, a work by his son Cornelis de Heem (1631-1695) or another follower misattributed to the father, or an error in the dating. The de Heem workshop produced numerous copies and variants of the master's compositions, and his influence on subsequent Flemish and Dutch still-life painting was so pervasive that works in his manner were produced for over a century after his death. The 'Fruit and Flowers' combination — mixing the two sub-genres into a single composition — was a format de Heem himself practiced and that his followers continued, the decorative appeal of such combinations sustaining market demand well into the eighteenth century.

Given the impossible date, technical analysis must account for the possibility that this is a later copy or follower's work. The painting technique would show the conventions of late seventeenth or eighteenth-century still-life painting rather than de Heem's own hand — possibly looser in the glazing, with different ground preparation and a somewhat different palette approach depending on when and by whom it was actually executed.