The Most Beautiful Asparagus You’ve Ever Seen

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Adriaen Coorte loves asparagus. [music] About 1/5 of his known paintings included asparagus. [music] But, have you ever seen asparagus painted so well? This painting is only 25 cm [music] high, and Coorte gives most of it to shadow. A bundle of white asparagus [music] lies across this stone ledge, slanting from lower left to upper right. The stalks [music] are cut, pale and fleshy. Their tips gather in the dark, [music] bruised with purple and brown. A thin cord pulls the bundle [music] tight. Beneath it, the stone is cracked. If you know Dutch still life, you know what's missing.

[00:00:47]There's no silver bowl or glass or lemon peel or feast, [music] just asparagus.

[00:00:53]And the question is not what does this asparagus mean? It's why has Coorte made us look at this so closely.

[00:01:02]>> [music] >> In the Golden Age, still life was to display splendor, [music] costly vessels, imported fruit, fine cloths.

[00:01:12]But, this [music] painting is not painting that at all. He chooses one seasonal food, cut [music] from the ground and bound for use. And it's already beginning to pass. [music] This is a vanitas, but a quiet one. A vanitas lets time [music] press on what we can see. Here, time is not in a skull [music] or a candle, it's in the darkening tips, the broken piece [music] on the ledge, the crack through the stone, the bundle loosely held together, but not forever. And Coorte does not make asparagus [music] beautiful by making it grand. He makes it beautiful by attending to it. Ordinary matter matters not because it stops being ordinary, but because it [music] has been truly seen. May I not rush past what is plain? May I see the beauty and receive small things before they disappear? I notice how the artist sees beauty in such an ordinary place.

[00:02:26][music] Today, I will let my eyes marvel at the small things in my world.