The still life paintings of Osias Beert are characterized by their unusually high viewpoint whereby the objects, arranged in carefully balanced and self-consciously artificial compositions, are offered to the beholder on steeply sloping tabletops. Beert became the chief exponent of this rather advanced concept of enhancing the visibility and appreciation of the objects depicted. The careful arrangement of three loose cherries beside the Wan-li bowl is a motif that recurs in Beert's early panel in the Heinz collects ion.¹ A similar date of between 1605 and 1610 has been suggested for this picture by Fred Meijer, to whom we are grateful.

¹ See I. Bergstrom, in Still Lifes in the Golden Age: Northern European Paintings from the Heinz Family collects ion, exhibition catalogue, Washington 1989, p. 95, cat. no. 3, reproduced.