Signature on the table on the left.

Provenance: Kunsthandel AG, Luzern; Private collection, Italy;Galerie Lingenauber, Düsseldorf/Paris;
Formerly Christie's, London, 5 July 1997, lot 51 (adjudication 45.689€).
Exhibitions: The lure of still life", Galerie Lingenauber, Düsseldorf 1995, p. 204, n°. XXXVI.

One of the most representative still life painters of the "Golden Age" of Flemish and Dutch art, Jasper Geerards is however a figure whose biography still remains largely enigmatic. Probably born in Antwerp around 1620, he was a pupil of the Guild of St. Luke of the city, where his name is registered in 1634. It can be hypothesized, although there are no documents to attest it, that he was a pupil of Jan Davidsz de Heem ( 1606-1684), who in those years was in Antwerp. After becoming Master of the Guild in 1644, Geerards moved to Amsterdam, where he is attested in 1649: from the same year there is a document, the last providing direct information about the artist, in which he denounces the theft of a work. In October 1654, a notarial document defines the painter's wife as a "widow", confirming the artist's death between the years 1649 and 1654.
Specialized in paintings depicting still lifes, often in rich forms and arranged on laid tables (the so-called "pronkstillevens"), however, not many ascertained works of his corpus are preserved: among them, see a large "Still Life with lobster" already attributed to de Heem and kept at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Troyes (inv. D. 53-1) and another work with the same subject, kept at the Bredius Museum in The Hague, attributed to Geerards after a restoration (Inv .nr. 134-1946, Cat.nr. 61-1). For a direct comparison with our work, see another Still Life, of very similar dimensions, attested in the mid-90s at the Salomon Lilian Gallery in Amsterdam / Geneva (https://rkd.nl/explore/images/7542).