Basket with Peaches and Plums
1654.Room 018
The works of Pedro Camprobín were the most important alternative in mid-seventeenth-century Seville to the still lifes of Francisco and Juan de Zurbarán, and this allowed him to dominate the market after their deaths. Instead of the geometric rigor and expressive concentration of the Zurbarans, Camprobín preferred compositions in which the objects were laid out in an apparently casual manner, and he developed extraordinary skill at capturing their textures. Those qualities are evident in this work, in which he played with the supposed disorder of the spilled fruit, whose skin has a velvety texture that is unmistakably his. As counterpoint to the whirlwind of fruit, he adds a ceramic vessel and a wine goblet with a very elegant profile, generating the type of contrast he so enjoyed.
