(Antwerp 1631–1697 Naples)
Still Life of Fruit in a Landscape,signed at lower right on the stone below the basket: Abram. Brugel. Fe,
oil on canvas, 121 x 175.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Gigina Necchi Campiglio, Villa Necchi Campiglio, Milan;
Sale, il Ponte, Milan, 28 October 2003, lot 352;
Private collection, Milan

The present composition is divided into two parts: on the left there is a rock formation in the foreground that serves as a base for the still life, while the right half opens up into a view of a hilly Italianate landscape.

On the bottom level of the stepped rock in the foreground are arranged from left to right: a cut water melon with a knife and two large melons, the right of which is cut open, with pears, peaches, and sprays of plums in front of them, followed by apples, two lemons, further peaches and apples, a spray of three blue plums, and several red and yellow cherries.

Slightly shifted to the right and approximately in the centre of the composition, a basket overflowing with plums, grapes, and cherries appears on the upper level of the rock. The pieces of fruit partly hang over the rim of the basket in whose interior apples, plums, cherries, and grapes are piled up to form a ‘mountain of fruit’ crowned with white and pink blossoms.

Towards the background, a brown cloth extends in front of the landscape, with a bouquet of flowers in a silver baroque vase set off against it. A thin trunk covered with foliage resembling a vine appears on the right-hand side of the brown cloth, mediating between the foreground and the landscape backdrop. The leaves are conspicuously silhouetted against the cloud-covered, light-blue sky. Behind the rock formation in the foreground and to its right extends an area of green shrubbery. In the far distance appears a mountain range with an Italianate fortress, with further peaks behind, their light-blue colour suggesting depth.

Abraham Brueghel was born in Antwerp in 1631, the second son of Jan Brueghel the Younger and Anna Maria Jannsens. Abraham was the only significant painter from the fourth generation of the Brueghel dynasty of painters. Initially he trained in his father’s studio, and travelled to Italy before 1649. He returned to Antwerp and in 1655 became a master of the local Guild of Saint Luke. After 1660 he settled in Rome, where he married in 1666. On 3 August 1670 he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca. He is documented in Naples from March 1671 onwards, when he joined the brotherhood of the Virtuis al Pantheon.

In his early oeuvre Abraham Brueghel initially worked in this father’s style using the great models of the past, but he began to model himself on Daniel Seghers after his arrival in Italy. In the second half of the seventeenth century, many Flemish still life painters relied on Daniel Seghers, the only known student of Jan Brueghel the Elder, rather than on Jan’s opulent bouquets of flowers in the Mannerist tradition. Seghers ‘invented’ the balanced play of evenly distributed formal accents. In his art, all blossoms rendered within a bouquet are of equal importance.

The present composition displays Abraham Brueghel´s close observation of nature as revealed in the individual pieces of fruit and flowers, which is typical trait of Northern European painting. Detail and precision are still almost as important to him as they had been to his father and even more so to his grandfather, Jan Brueghel the Elder; however in the present composition his painting style is generally less obsessed with detail and more generous when it comes to the depiction of the individual petals. The artist’s brushwork is confident and full of temperament culminating in an exercise of ‘pure’ painting through the melons cut open and the accurately rendered surface textures of such southern fruit as lemons. Such painterly quality established Abraham Brueghel’s reputation as one of the most important still life painters of the High Baroque in Italy.

Other signed works by Abraham Brueghel are known and as such it is possible to delineate his oeuvre. In terms of style and composition the present work may be compared to Flowers and Fruit in Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans–Van Beuningen, signed ‘A. Breugel Fe.’, also datable to around 1670.

Klaus Ertz has confirmed the attribution and has suggested a date of execution to around circa 1670.