This rare still life from Gérard van Spaendonck’s early period is in a remarkably undisturbed state of preservation. It was shown at the Paris Salon in 1783 alongside a composition by him entitled Still Life of Flowers in an Alabaster Vase (see fig. 1), which is now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. That flower piece is arguably one of his best known compositions today, even if Spaendonck did not produce a great number of oil paintings. Van Spaendonck was a leading and active figure in the Parisian art world and a teacher of countless French and foreign artists. As illustrator to Louis XVI’s botanical collection at the Jardin du Roi, a highly prestigious position and one in which he would be succeeded by his famous pupil Redouté, much of his time was devoted to his watercolours of plants and to teaching. Indeed, his Fleurs dessinés d’après Nature, a book of twenty-four engraved flower drawings, is considered the finest instructional work of its kind. He is nonetheless regarded as his era’s greatest painter of flower pieces and still lifes. When he left his native Tilburg for Paris in 1766, it could be argued that this was the first time the focal point of flower and still life painting had ever left the Netherlands. Instinctively, he was able to adapt his style to the elegance and sophistication of French taste and, by 1774, the twenty-eight-year-old painter was the leading designer for the decoration of porcelain at Sèvres and had also been appointed Painter of Miniatures to Louis XVI. Under Napoleon, van Spaendonck was awarded the Légion d’honneur and was made a count in 1808. The absence of flowers in this painting makes it an atypical work by this specialist in the genre, who had succeeded Jan van Huysum as heir to the age old tradition of exceptional technical skill and specialist expertise. Van Spaendonck’s mastery extended across all media and scales, from metre high Salon canvases to miniatures, and across a remarkable variety of supports, including canvas, panel, marble (see fig. 2), vellum, paper, ivory and porcelain. Given its date, there is no doubt that van Spaendonck would have studied and absorbed some of the magic found in similar compositions by Jean-Siméon Chardin. Interpreting Chardin in a distinctly aristocratic and neoclassical manner, he surely included the elegant Sèvres tasse à café seen here as a reference to his role at the eponymous Manufacture nationale.