(The Hague 1620-1663/1670 Middelburg?)
A still life of fruit, a chinese porcelain bowl and a fish on a stove,
oil on canvas, 67 x 78, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Belgium

We are grateful to Fred Meijer, who has identified the present painting, once wrongly attributed to Jan Davidsz. de Heem, as an authentic and typical work by Laurens Craen, probably executed around 1650.

In Lexikon der Holländischen Stilllebenmaler im 17. Jahrhundert (E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Lingen 1995, p. 271), Craen’s still lifes are described as follows: “Craen’s tonal banquet pieces usually show the left or right corner of a table half-covered with a piece of cloth on which a pewter plate with pomegranates, fish, or shellfish has been placed. This principal motif is accompanied by a peeled lemon and by the inevitable bunches of grapes, whose leaves are reminiscent of the vine tendrils in the pictures of Balthasar van der Ast. Yet this very motif also displays the difference between inventor and follower most distinctly. Laurens Craen’s vine leaves are larger, and he incorporates them into the overall diagonal composition of his pictures. He shows the leaves as spatial elements creeping between light and shadow, as mediating between foreground and background.”

Craen’s oeuvre is small. In 1980, Vroom (N. R. A. Vroom, A Modest Message as Intimated by the Painters of the ‘Monochrome Banketje’, Schiedam 1980), listed six paintings, whereas in 1984 Sam Segal (De beleving van het stilleven, in: Beeld-Tijdschrift voor Kunst, Kunsttheorie en Kunstgeschiedenis, 4, 1984, p. 30) mentioned as many as twenty pictures.