NICOLAES VAN GELDER Still life with fruit and a Wan-Li bowl. 1674.

NICOLAES VAN GELDER

(Leiden 1636–1677 Amsterdam)
Still life with fruit and a Wan-Li bowl. 1674.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated lower left: N VGelder. f. 1674.
63.3 × 53.3 cm.

Provenance:
- T.w.C. Moore collection, USA (verso with label).
- The New York Historical Society collection, from 1872.
- Auction Sotheby's, New York, The New York Historical Society collection, 12 January 1995, lot 41 (with a pendant by Nicolaes van Gelder).
- With David Koetser, Zurich, and Xaver Scheidwimmer, Munich, 1995.
- Private collection, southern Germany.

Exhibited:
New York 1915, Gallery of Art of the New York Historical Society.

Literature:
- Exh. cat. Catalogue of the Gallery of Art of the New York Historical Society, New York 1915, p. 26, no. 213.
- Laurens J. Bol: Holländische Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts nahe den grossen Meistern, pp. 303–04, ill. 279.

Nicolaes van Gelder was born in Leiden and probably trained as a still-life painter in the workshop of Pieter de Ring (1615/1620–1660). He is documented in Stockholm between 1661 and 1663, and also in Denmark in 1664 and 1673.

Characteristic of his still lifes are the finely graduated modelling and the naturalistic rendering of reflections of light, worked out with great precision even on the individual grapes, as can also be impressively observed in the present work.

The painting remained for more than a century in the collection of the New York Historical Society, today one of New York's oldest museums.