Adriaen Coorte

His work continued an intimate form of still-life painting associated with the earlier seventeenth century, and he has been described as “one of the last practitioners of this intimate category”.

The recorded working language is Dutch. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are still life and animal. Places of work recorded in the authority are Middelburg. Works named in the authority record are Still Life with Strawberries, Still Life with Asparagus and A Bowl of Strawberries on a Stone Plinth. Work by Adriaen Coorte is recorded in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Ashmolean Museum, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Zeeuws Museum and Dordrechts Museum.

Very little is known about Coorte’s life. He is generally believed to have been born in or near Middelburg and to have worked there for much of his career. Around 1680, he became a pupil of Melchior d'Hondecoeter in Amsterdam. Hondecoeter frequently repeated particular birds and poses across his compositions, and similar motifs appear in Coorte’s early paintings. Coorte’s Pelican and Ducks in a Mountain Landscape, for example, includes a pelican closely related to one in Hondecoeter’s The Floating Feather. Comparable hoopoe motifs also occur in paintings by both artists. By 1683, Coorte appears to have returned to Middelburg, where he established a workshop and began signing the small still lifes for which he became known. Archival evidence records his activity in Middelburg from 1695, when he was fined for selling a painting before becoming a member of the local Guild of Saint Luke. His works also appear in contemporary Middelburg inventories. Neither his date of birth nor his date of death is securely documented.

Coorte appears to have remained little known outside Middelburg during his lifetime. His reputation faded almost entirely after his death. The Dutch art historian Laurens J. Bol initiated the modern reassessment of Coorte with an article published in 1952. Bol later organized an exhibition of thirty-five paintings at the Dordrechts Museum in 1958 and published the first monograph and catalogue raisonné devoted to the artist in 1977. The 1958 exhibition attracted considerable attention in the Netherlands and inspired poets including Hans Faverey and Ed Leeflang. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., presented an exhibition devoted to Coorte in 2003. A travelling exhibition titled Ode to Coorte followed in 2008 and further established him as one of the most prominent rediscovered painters of the Dutch Baroque period.

Two newly discovered paintings by Coorte were sold on 1 December 2009, each achieving a price exceeding its pre-sale estimate. A new auction record for Coorte was established at Sotheby's on 3 December 2014, when Three Peaches on a Stone Ledge with a Red Admiral Butterfly sold for £3,444,500.