Gooseberries on a Table (1701): Art, History and Details

Gooseberries on a Table (1701) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Adriaen Coorte (Dutch, 1660–1707).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Gooseberries on a Table
• Date: 1701
• Creator attribution: Adriaen Coorte (Dutch, 1660–1707)
• Culture: Netherlands, early 18th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on paper mounted on wood
• 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.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Dutch
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1987.32

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Buvelot, Quentin. The still lifes of Adriaen Coorte (active c.1683-1707): with oeuvre catalogue. The Hague: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, 2008.
• Hilde de Boer-Venverloo, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, May 15, 2013, in CMA curatorial file.
• Hilde de Boer-Venverloo, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, May 15, 2013, in CMA curatorial file.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.