A bowl of peaches and grapes with a roemer and a peeled lemon, on a pewter plate, on a draped table

Little is known about Jasper Geeraerts’s life. He was probably born in Antwerp and was listed as an apprentice painter in the city’s Guild of Saint Luke in 1634/5. A ‘Gasper Geeraerdi’ is first documented as a master in the guild a decade later. He must have moved to Amsterdam in or before August 1649, the year after this painting, when he reported a theft of a still life from his studio in the city. Geeraerts had passed away in or before October 1654, when his wife, Anna Geerardi, is described in a notarial document as a widow.

Geeraerts’s surviving paintings display a close affinity with still lifes by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, with whom Geeraerts may have studied in Antwerp in the 1630s (de Heem settled in Antwerp in 1636). A similarly conceived roemer and lemon to those visible here can be found in Geeraerts’s large-scale fragment in the Museum Bredius in The Hague.

Though ‘practically unknown even to art historians’ (Meijer, op. cit., p. 43), in part due to the scarcity of his works, in his own day Geeraerts was a leading still life painter whose pictures entered some of the most important collections of their day. Among the early owners of his paintings was Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1662), governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1646 to 1656, whose collection included Geeraerts’s pronk still life sold Christie’s, Amsterdam, 14 May 2003, lot 189 for EUR 107,550.