The liberally applied white highlights and twisting forms of the leaves are signature elements of the still lifes produced by Giovanni Paolo Spadino in Rome during the 1690s. Unlike the meticulous, studied method of depicting fruit and vegetation that was popular in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the looser brushwork used to paint Peaches and Pears in a Glass Bowl reflects a more relaxed approach to the genre at the century’s end. Spadino borrows the motif of the glass bowl piled high with ripe fruit from Rome’s most prominent still-life painter at the time, the Flemish expatriate Abraham Brueghel, who was Spadino’s neighbor from 1671 until 1674. Although foreign-born artists, like Brueghel, set the trends in still-life painting at the time, Spadino was able to find a market for his work. His paintings are found in inventories of aristocratic collections in both Rome and Naples.

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