Lot 2029 D α

Peter Binoit was born in Cologne but, like Sebastian Stoskopff, he also appears to have been taught by Daniel Soreau in Hanau. The earliest signed and dated work by this artist is one from 1611. Binoit first seems to have specialised in floral still lifes and only started to include fruit in his compositions in 1616. Throughout his career, Binoit painted both works with simple, sparse compositions as well as richly laden tables. Gerhard Bott explains the artist's simultaneous production of more and less opulent works by the differing prices which could be charged for paintings with varying levels of detail. This way the artist could appeal to different sectors of the market and customer bases (cf. Bott 2001, ibid. p. 74).
The present work is one of the most detailed and opulent pieces in the artist's oeuvre, and surely would have been one of the costliest. It shows an assortment of food and drinks arranged in parallel on a stone ledge against a dark background. We see a large Wan Li dish filled with red and yellow plums, and beside it a vase of roses that reminds us of Binoit's origins as a flower painter. On the left side of the canvas is a large artichoke and an opened bean pod, whilst a bunch of green asparagus is placed in the foreground, protruding slightly over the table's edge. To the left of this is a small basket of wild strawberries and on the right a handful of loose currants on a large leaf. This varied and luxurious assortment is enlivened by several fruiting sprigs of gooseberries, plums, strawberries, currants, cherries, and a squirrel perching in the centre of the work, nibbling gleefully on a hazelnut.
This work can be dated to Binoit's later period - the artist died in 1632 - through comparison to a variation on the same composition of almost identical size housed in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel (inv. no. GK 1067). The date of this work is barely legible today, but is recorded in inventories made in 1816 and 1875 as “1631”. We are therefore also able to date the present work to the penultimate year of the artist's life. This work differs from the example in Kassel largely due to the presence of the squirrel, which is there replaced by a bundle of carrots.