Gooseberries on a Table
Adriaen Coorte (Dutch, 1660–1707)
1701
- Medium
- oil on paper mounted on wood
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 45.5 x 38.5 x 4.5 cm (17 15/16 x 15 3/16 x 1 3/4 in.); Unframed: 29.7 x 22.8 cm (11 11/16 x 9 in.)
- Culture
- Netherlands, early 18th Century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Coorte worked in Middelburg, a wealthy maritime city in the southern part of the Netherlands that fostered a poetic, scientific, and spiritual examination of the natural world. Gooseberries—a modest, local pleasure—could be picked in the wild, although Dutch gardeners in the 1600s were the first to cultivate them to improve their taste. The strong illumination gives the plant a stark grandeur, despite the small scale, and the dark background emphasizes the fruit's delicate translucency. The dessicated flower petals and waxy leaves contrast with the succulent gooseberries, with their skin on the verge of bursting.
