Sebastian Stoskopff (alternately Sébastien Stoskopff) was a 17th Century painter from Alsace, a German-speaking region of France, though he spent the core of his productive years in Paris.
Stoskopff’s work was “rediscoved” in the 1930’s, with an appreciation for the intensely focused realism and detailed handling of his still life paintings, as well as the reduction in the number of objects in his compositions, harkening back to earlier still life traditions and away from the dramatic tableaux of multiple objects more common in his time.
Worth noting is the piece in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Still Life with a Nautilus, Panther Shell and Chip-Wood Box, for which the website allows you to zoom in to a point of considerable detail (images above, bottom two).
You can also zoom in, though not as far, on this image of a piece in the Norton Simon Museum.
[Via Jeffrey Hayes]
