Three peaches on a stone ledge with a Lady Butterfly was sold last Wednesday in Bonhams Old Master paintings sale. The recently discovered work, consigned to auction by a private collector in Australia, started at a modest price of 300.000 pounds, and was finally auctioned off for 2.1 million pounds. It automatically became the new record for the artist at auction, surpassing all expectations and smashing its estimate of 300.000-500.000 pounds. 

The new work by Coorte is an important step in the recovery and understanding of the rest of Still Lifes by his hand. Among the many unusual characteristics of the work, was the monogram of the painter, instead of his usual signature, and the fact that it was undated, something quite uncommon in the works by this artist. However thanks to the recent identification of other works, an orientative date Circa 1693-1695 has been assigned.

A little more than fifty years ago, this painter was a complete stranger, and his work was neither appreciated nor studied. Like the rest of the Dutch school components, Coorte was not valued as much as he deserved until after the Second World War. Since Laurens J. Bol wrote the first article centered on the painter in 1952, and 20 years later published the catalogue raissonée on the artist, little more has been found on the painter from Middelburg. It is known that he spent most of his life in the Dutch locality, but his date of birth and death is still unknown.  

Thanks to Laurens J. Bol, who resucitated the painter from his ashes more than three centuries after his death, Coorte's ouvre was examined in deph, for the first time, in an exhibition in the Dordrechts museum that gathered more than thirty of his works. Holland surrendered to the subtle and tender style of this author, who seemed to imitate the Dutch masters from the first half of the seventeenth century more than his contemporaries. Several scholars and specialists have linked his work to the traditional Spanish Bodegon (Still Life) genre, and the poet Ed Leeflang was deeply influenced by his sensibility to capture some of the most astonishing details rendered in his still lifes.  

A unique style, and a biography filled with shadows, must have been well enough reason to multiply its starting price and establish a new record for the artist at auction. Sotheby's Amsterdam Old Master sale of 2009 already presented two hammer prices near the two million dollar mark (one of them for a work acutely similar to the one sold this week). However his last appearance at auction, at the beginning of this year in New York, indicated a slight fall in the demand for this painter and was probably the reason for the extreme caution excercised by Bonhams in the present ocassion. Alfonso Carbajo Agrasar       

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