(Antwerp 1610–1673 Paris)
A still life with apples, pears, quinces, grapes, plums, berries, figs, a melon, nuts and artichokes with a grey parrot, a hoopoe and songbirds before a formal garden,
oil on canvas, 117.5 x 155.3 cm, framed

We are grateful to Ursula Härting for identifying the painter after careful examination of the original.

Born in Antwerp and trained in the Flemish tradition of Cornelis de Vos and Frans Snyders, Van Boeckel is considered by art historians to belong to the French still life painters (French: Pieter van Boucle). Boeckel’s mostly large-format paintings, often executed in cooperation with figure painters, are preserved in numerous museums. From 1623 onwards Boeckel worked in Paris for the local aristocracy and upper-middle class, in whose estates many of his pictures are documented. Subsequently, he received commissions from the French King Louis XIV and was probably an assistant in the studios of Simon Vouet, Lubin Baugin, Louise Moillon and Jacques Linard. Only few of his paintings carry his monogram of P. V. B. or are dated.

Boeckel’s portraits of cultivated plants or the fruits of a kitchen garden, which is usually part of an aristocratic country estate, are almost always pristine, shiny, and mostly individually “arranged” in rows and groups. Also in the plethora of a basket Boeckel’s fruits are displayed in their individuality and entirety, with little overlapping. Animals populating his large-format still lifes are characteristic for his oeuvre. The Louvre still preserves two paintings, dated 1651, originally belonging to the collection of Louis XIV (see Didier Bodart in: Le Dictionaire des peintres belges, Brussels 1995, p. 989 f.) Boeckel’s stills lifes are almost always in an elevated position, separated from a view of a city, countryside or garden, and they do not blend in organically with their environment. In the present painting, a grey parrot in the centre of the picture is nibbling at an apple, another bird (an imaginary bird similar to a male chaffinch or goldfinch, and resembling a falcon in its flight, for which we are grateful to J. Härting and the staff of IPN-Uni Kiel) swooping down onto a long-tailed tit, and a hoopoe crouching in front of a tree. Although only its trunk is visible, it is probably an elm. Pomona, the skilled gardener, lived in an enclosed garden, loved apples above all and devoted herself with enthusiasm to the cultivation of this fruit. Ovid offers a comprehensive narrative about Pomona’s love for gardening and the story of her wooer, Vertumnus, who describes an imposing elm entwined with vine tendrils as the emblem of a desirable marriage: just as a woman needs a man, so too, do tendrils need a tree (Metamorphoses, XIV, 622 f.). This is a cryptic, mythological association that is as telling as the background in the painting. The staffage of minute figures that populates it includes gardeners at work in a country estate with a dovecote and elegant visitors - in pairs - in the formal garden with flat parterres surrounded by treillages, as was customary in Flanders in the early 17th century. (see exh. cat. Gärten and Höfe der Rubenszeit, Hamm, ed. by U. Härting, Munich 2000).
The staffage painter follows the tradition of Jan Brueghel. It is as yet unknown who the Antwerp artist was who painted the Brueghel-like, cheerful and realistic staffage of this pleasure garden.