Still Life with Cherries

Osias Beert specialized in refined still lifes of food. At the start of the seventeenth century he executed a series of appetizing paintings in which he depicted all sorts of delicacies with great realism. Here we see a pewter bowl filled with orangey-red cherries—a recurring motif for the artist. The seemingly simple motif includes a range of refined details. The shiny gleam of the berries and their subtly shifting hues, as well as the suggestion of dents in the rim of the pewter bowl all add to the strong illusionism of the painting.