Still life with apples and grapes in a wicker basket on a table

Still Life with Apples and Grapes in a Wicker Basket from around 1635 by Judith Leyster is a fruit still life demonstrating her range beyond genre scenes and portraits. Dutch still-life painting was a highly developed specialty in the seventeenth century, with artists competing to render the textures and colors of fruit with unprecedented naturalistic accuracy. Leyster's entry into the genre shows her competitive ambition and technical versatility. The Goudstikker collection, which once held this work, was one of the most important private art collections in Amsterdam before its forced dispersal during the Nazi occupation—a history that has made provenance research for works from that collection a matter of ongoing restitution scholarship. The painting demonstrates Leyster's ability to move fluently between the genre subjects with which she is most identified and the specialist still-life tradition.

The fruits are rendered with careful attention to their varied surfaces and colors, the wicker basket providing textural contrast in a composition of characteristic Dutch still-life clarity.