“Who?” is a perfectly acceptable response to the news that an Evaristo Baschenis exhibition recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum. Until the early 1950s, this Northern Italian painter of still lifes was obscure to the point of being known only to specialists, and, despite rekindled interest in his work, the facts of his life remained largely untraced until recently. The great French art historian Charles Sterling, for many years Curator of Paintings at the Louvre, discussed Baschenis at some length in his pioneering book Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Present Time (1952). “Outside of Rome,” Sterling wrote, “it was precisely in the North, in the person of Evaristo Baschenis … that Caravaggio found a follower of talent”—of such talent that Sterling called him the most original painter of still life in seventeenth-century Italy. He compared Baschenis favorably, too, with the Spanish bodegone painters, noting that like the Spaniards, the Italian painted “many kitchen pieces in which livid poultry and blood-stained meat glow with a certain pathos,” yet Sterling chose to reproduce in his book not a kitchen piece, but one of the luminous compositions with musical instruments for which Baschenis was acclaimed in his lifetime.

In 1953, Baschenis’s presence in the Milanese exhibition I pittori della realtà in Lombardia(“Lombard realist painters”) fostered an appreciation of this astonishing artist, but the present level of knowledge about his work dates mainly from the 1970s and 1980s; information about his life was pieced together only in the 1990s.