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Still life with fruit and macaws
Painter: Ast, Balthasar van der
Label text from the exhibition Feast and Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 15001800, on display at The Fitzwilliam Museum from 26 November 2019 until 31 August 2020: Still life with fruit and macaws Painted on copper for maximum luminosity, this brightly coloured image was designed to delight the senses. On the one hand, it celebrates abundance, luxury, and the exotic with succulent fruit, two New World macaws, and two Chinese blue-and-white porcelain dishes made for export to Europe. However, closer inspection reveals insects on the fruit, leaves curling and turning brown, and a pomegranate past its best. Such details were included as a coded moralising message to show the destructive effects of time, calling to mind the brevity of life and warning against worldly vanity: the fruit will rot, the birds will die, and the porcelain will break.
Balthasar van der Ast (1593/94 1657) Utrecht, Netherlands, 1622 Oil on copper Daniel Mesman Bequest, 1834 (295) 66 Dish with pomegranate tree This unusually large mid-seventeenth-century Chinese blue-and-white dish is embellished with a stylised pomegranate tree-of-life. A pair of split-open pomegranates nestle at the centre of its trunk, their seeds deliberately exposed as a sign of their reproductive capacity. Like the porcelain dishes in van der Asts painting (displayed to the left), this expensive dish was made for a wealthy European, the luxury and exoticism of the pomegranate motif echoing that of the porcelain.
Oil painting on a copper plate, depicting fruit and macaws. The various fruits includes grapes, cherries, pears, apricots and pomegranate. In the foreground are a pair of macaws, one red and yellow, the other yellow and dark green-black, as well as a pair of Ming blue and white porcelain dishes.
Bequeathed by Daniel Mesman
Height: 20.5 cm
Width: 26.8 cm
Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1834) by Mesman, Daniel
17th Century#
Production date:
AD 1622
Support composed of copper
Painting (image-making) : Oil on copper
Accession number: 295
Primary reference Number: 1078
Stable URI
Owner or interested party:
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Associated department:
Paintings, Drawings and Prints
This record can be cited in the Harvard Bibliographic style using the text below:
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IIIF Manifest
The Fitzwilliam Museum (2024) "Still life with fruit and macaws" Web page available at: https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/object/1078 Accessed: 2024-12-22 08:24:01
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{{cite web|url=https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/object/1078
|title=Still life with fruit and macaws
|author=The Fitzwilliam Museum|accessdate=2024-12-22 08:24:01|publisher=The
University of Cambridge}}
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