(Vienna 1756–1811)
Two still lifes of flowers with grapes and a bird’s nest
oil on panel, each 79 x 58 cm, framed, a pair (2)

Provenance:
Private collection, Vienna

We are grateful to Ursula J. A. de Goede-Broug of the RKD, The Hague, for identifying these two paintings as works by Drechsler on the basis of photographs. She dates the pictures into the first decade of the 19th century and compares them with a signed flower still life dated to 1807.

Drechsler was a porcelain painter trained at the Vienna porcelain factory. As G. and M. Frodl point out in their book about flower painting in Vienna (Vienna 2010, p. 161), he ‘switched to the oil and watercolour technique in the 1780s and achieved a superior quality in his pictures of flowers, for which he referred to the art of Dutch flower painting, particularly to that of Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum. His paintings, whose realism in terms of detail and elegant arrangements influenced a whole generation of Viennese flower painters, were also collected outside Austria […]’. Drechsler rapidly became Vienna’s most prominent flower painter and enjoyed great success. G. and M. Frodl: ‘Nobody could outrival him when it came to the gauzy lightness of his painting style, which became Drechsler’s ‘trademark’. In their light-coloured appeal, these floral bouquets do not […] hark back to the 17th-century ‘classics’, but to the late phase of Dutch flower painting exemplified not only by Jan van Huysum, but also by those Dutch artists of the late 18th century who attracted great attention in Paris, such as Jan van Os and the Van Spaendonck brothers [...].’

In 1807, a special school for ‘flower drawing’ was established at the Academy, as well as a school for ‘flower, fruit, and animal painting’, of which Drechsler himself was the head. During this decade he arrived at the acme of his career. His works constitute an early zenith of Viennese flower painting and set a standard for this specifically Viennese art.