Simon Luttichuys

Simon Luttichuys was baptised on 6 March 1610 in London, the son of Dutch parents, and is documented as an anglicized "Little-House" or "Littlehouse" in period English writing. He is probably the same painter as "Simon Littlehouse," who painted a portrait of Bishop Thomas Morton of St John's College, Cambridge around 1637 to 1638. No school, master, or precise years of training are documented for him. Auction house catalogue notes state plainly that whether he trained further in England or continued his education in the Netherlands "is not known."

By 1644 he had produced his first known dated still life, and by 1649 he had relocated to Amsterdam, where he built his reputation as a still-life painter working in the vanitas and pronkstilleven traditions, arrangements of costly objects, fruit, and symbolic memento mori elements meant to be read as much as admired. In 1655 he married Anna van Peene, an Englishwoman from Norfolk, in Amsterdam. His younger brother, Isaack Luttichuys, was also a working painter, chiefly a portraitist, and the two are sometimes confused in attribution. Around a decade after his move to Amsterdam, the London writer William Sanderson singled him out in print for his skill at painting what English writers of the period called "dead-standing-things," an early term for still life. Simon Luttichuys was buried in Amsterdam on 16 November 1661.

Luttichuys had real standing in his own lifetime. William Sanderson, writing in London roughly a decade after the artist settled in Amsterdam, praised his "extraordinary mastery" of the still-life genre. The National Gallery Prague's collection notes describe him as a well-regarded painter in his own time whose reputation later faded, a judgment that captures the arc of his reception: prized among contemporaries and specialist collectors, then largely eclipsed by better-remembered Dutch still-life painters, and only gradually being reassessed through museum scholarship such as Bernd Ebert's monograph on Simon and Isaack Luttichuys. His reported influence on Willem Kalf, one of the most celebrated pronkstilleven painters, is the clearest sign that period specialists took his work seriously as more than a minor contribution to the genre.

Luttichuys's auction market is thin, and a comprehensive, verified all-time auction record could not be confirmed from available sources. Documented public results include a still life that sold for CHF 61,200 at Koller Auktionen in Zurich (exact sale date not confirmed) and a still life that sold for EUR 16,770 at Van Ham in Cologne on 18 November 2011. A comparable still life carried a Sotheby's London estimate of GBP 70,000 to 100,000 in a 2025 Old Master evening sale. With no catalogue raisonne and only a handful of documented public sales, individual results depend heavily on subject matter, condition, and provenance rather than on a broad, liquid trading history.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Simon Luttichuys, so provenance, RKD documentation, and specialist Old Master connoisseurship carry more weight than they would for an artist with a settled scholarly catalogue. Buyers should also take care to distinguish his still lifes from the portraits of his brother Isaack Luttichuys, since the two are occasionally conflated in older attributions and sale records. His documented auction history is short and fragmented across a handful of European houses, which means any single sale should be read in the context of that thin record rather than as evidence of a broad, actively traded market.