SÉBASTIEN STOSKOPFF (Strasbourg, 1597-Idstein, 1657) DISH OF TARTS AND GLASS RÖMER WITH A GILT POKAL Canvas Old restorations Still life with Römer and Pokal, canvas, with restorations 50 x 61,5 CM - 19,7 x 24,2 IN. We would like to thank Mrs Marie-Caroline Heck for confirming the authenticity of this painting after a visual examination on 12 March 2024. She likens our painting to the composition dated 1627 or 1629, the artist's Paris period, in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, in which we find the pewter jug. The loaf of bread is found in the composition in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre (see B. Hahn-Woernle, Sebastian Stoskopff, Stuttgart, 1996, no. 22 and no. 64, reproduced in colour). We find Stoskopff's own technique in the way he details the hanap with snakeskin chasing. We find this work in the magistrate's goblets painted in the composition Grande Nature morte d'orfèvrerie (Pasadena, Norton Simon Foundation) and in the goblet produced by Daniel Dietrich in Strasbourg around 1650 (Paris, Musée des Arts décoratifs). Our hanap is surmounted by a victory in the round, recalling the art of the great Strasbourg silversmith Paulus Graseck, designer of the hanap in the Trois-Epis treasure at Strasbourg's Musée Unterlinden. Stoskopff had a special connection with goldsmiths. His father-in-law, Nikolaus Riedinger, was one of Strasbourg's most renowned silversmiths, and Daniel Dietrich's wife Dorothea was the godmother of his daughter Anna Maria, baptised in 1647. Sébastien Stoskopff was a still life painter and for a time the master of Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), who wrote a short biography of him at the end of the 17th century. Born into a Protestant family from Strasbourg, Stoskopff was initially a pupil of the engraver and draughtsman Friedrich Brentel (1580-1651), whose influence is clearly perceptible in some of the artist's compositions in which engraving is combined with painting. He then trained in the studio of Daniel Soreau, a history, portrait and still-life painter and architect (active 1586-1619). In the course of his career, Stoskopff also travelled extensively: to Hanau, Paris, Venice, Troyes, Strasbourg and Idstein, where he came into contact with a wide variety of artistic milieus before developing a more personal style. He drew inspiration from the work of artists such as Lucas van Valckenborch and Georg Flegel, borrowing motifs and arrangements of fruit and vegetables, which he then isolated, giving them their own pictorial value. There are now around sixty still lifes by Stoskopff, twenty-six of which are signed and ten of which are dated.