Lot 2050 Dα

Abraham Brueghel was born in 1631 to Jan Brueghel the Younger and thus belongs to the fourth generation of this important Flemish family of painters. In 1649, at the age of 18, he travelled to Sicily to carry out a commission for Prince Antonio Ruffo. An inventory of the Ruffo collection already lists a total of eight paintings for the young painter that same year. Ten years later, he settled in Rome and then in around 1772 in Naples, where he died in the mid-1690s. Abraham Brueghel never returned to Flanders.
The Brueghel scion specialised from an early age in still life painting. Over the years he enriched the Flemish tradition of painters such as Frans Snyders or Jan Fyt with his Roman experiences and thus reached his own style. Abraham's painting consequently became an important source from which the significant still life painting of Naples with artists such as Pace del Campidoglio, Michele Cerquozzi or Andrea del Belvedere drew. In the present picture, Abraham Brueghel brings the fruits to the foreground of the canvas with confident, rapid brushstrokes and an almost Mediterranean sensuality of arrangement and colour palette.
We would like to thank Dr Fred G. Meijer for the confirmation of this painting as a characteristic work of Abraham Brueghel, most probably painted in Naples in the second half of the 1670s.