(Antwerp 1573–1621 The Hague)
Flowers in a berkemeyer glass with shells in a stone niche,
oil on panel, 63.5 x 43.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Wolf, Amsterdam, before 1927;
with Curt Benedict, Berlin, 1927;
with Julius Böhler, Munich, 1928-1931;
with Neue Galerie Schönemann, Munich, 1931;
with Eugene Slatter, London, 1951;
Private collection, Egypt, by 1951, until 1984;
sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 12 December 1984, lot 13;
Private collection, Switzerland

Exhibited:
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, La Nature Morte Hollandaise, Les principaux représentants, ses origines, son influence, 1929, p. X, no. 15

Literature:
E. Zarnowska, La Nature Morte Hollandaise, Les principaux représentants, ses origines, son influence, Maastricht 1929, p. 7, no. 17, ill.;L. J. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty: Painters of Flowers and Fruit, Leigh-on-Sea 1960, p. 64, no. 32, pl. 20

We are grateful to Fred Meijer for confirming the attribution to Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. He compares the present work to the Bouquet of Flowers in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. no. KMSsp211) and suggests an execution date in the same year of 1618.

The shells used in both compositions are evidently based on the same preparatory drawing. The use of the niche to frame the glass in which the flowers are set, along with the rendering of the rose petals is also similar in both compositions. Both are evidence of Bosschaert’s mastery, informed both by close observation of the natural world and also by knowledge of the pre-eminent botanical publications then so fashionable in the Dutch Republic. Bosschaert’s city of Middleburg, set between trade routes to the East Indies and the Americas, along with the emergence of the scientific age made it an important centre for the study of new exotic imports. Middleburg’s botanical gardens were most the comprehensive in Holland, as evidenced by Bosschaert’s naturalistic and graphic renditions of the flora in the present panel. The present work is understood to be both conceived from blooms Bosschaert depicted ad vivum, although they would not have flowered at the same time, and those drawn from manuals of scientifically recorded engravings of plants. Chief among these was probably the publication in 1571 of the Middleburg botanist (and later physician to James I of Great Britain) Mattias de l’Obel’s Stirpium adversaria nova.

The horticultural impossibility of the current composition, carefully arranged artificially, served not only as a record of natural beauty, which like exotic shells and insects could be conserved in a ‘kunstkammer’, but as a substitute for what was becoming the considerable expense of acquiring certain bulbs. While these paintings do not appear contain the overt religious symbolism of other contemporary works – Bosschaert himself was from a protestant family who had fled Antwerp for the United Provinces – nature itself was imbued with theological connotations: ‘We are pleased when we see a painted flower competing with a living. In one we admire the artifice of nature, in the other the genius of the painter, in each the goodness of god’ wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam in his Convivium Religiosum of 1552.

Bosschaert had three sons who all became flower painters; his brother-in-law Balthasar van der Ast also lived with him and ran his workshop in Utrecht and later Breda, constituting arguably the foremost dynasty of floral still-life painters of the Golden Age.