Still life of fruit with a wine glass

Painted in 1649 and now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, this fruit still life with a wine glass represents the classic de Heem combination: organic abundance rendered alongside the technical challenge of glass transparency. The Karlsruhe Kunsthalle holds one of Germany's most distinguished collections of European painting from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, and de Heem's presence there reflects the systematic German collecting of Dutch and Flemish Golden Age work during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 1649 date places this in the richest period of his Antwerp career, his technical mastery fully established and his compositional approach refined through more than two decades of dedicated still-life practice.

The wine glass — likely a rummer or roemer filled with white or red wine — presents his characteristic transparent vessel challenge. De Heem renders the wine's color through a thin glaze over the painting's ground, with the glass's form suggested by precise white highlights on its edges. The fruit arranged around and near the glass demonstrates his standard glazing vocabulary, each type given its specific surface character.