Nothing says beauty quite like a 17th-century Dutch flower still-life painting. Big, vibrant bouquets in opulent vases with insects and exotic fruit, blooms, and shells may first come to mind for such paintings. But in the 1600s, this new genre included a variety of styles from realistic bouquets to fantastical creations. Despite these different styles, all these flower still-life artists painted true to nature.
Naturally, when the Mauritshuis, a former palace in The Hague, Netherlands, came to celebrate its bicentenary this year, flowers came to mind. And what better way to honor the museum, which houses preeminent Dutch and Flemish Golden Age paintings, than by celebrating the over 400-year-old Dutch flower still-life tradition with an exhibition.
The Mauritshuis’s “In Full Bloom” exhibition gives an overview of flower still-life paintings between 1600 and 1730. Flower masterpieces from the museum’s rich holdings are on display, including works by great flower still-life painters Ambrosius Bosschaert, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Willem van Aelst, and Rachel Ruysch. The exhibition also includes loans from around the world.
Botanical Art
The flower still-life genre began around 1600. Growing, studying, and collecting exotic plants and flowers had become popular in the 16th century. Researchers made detailed illustrations of their plants and published them as etchings or engravings in albums called “florilegia,” translated from Latin as “a gathering of flowers.”
In 1594, physicist and botanist Carolus Clusius founded Hortus Botanicus, the Netherlands’ first botanical garden. According to the Amsterdam Tulip Museum, Clusius’s tulip research is still used to identify the flowers today.
In the 17th century, the tulip was first imported to the Netherlands via Turkey from Asia and other countries. “Tulipmania” ensued. Growers once noted the weight and price of their tulip bulbs on the botanical drawings in their catalogs. The exhibition includes many examples, including a watercolor by Jacob Marrel with the details of an Admirael Vander Eyck tulip. These drawings now attest to the high prices that were once paid for the bulbs—some of which once cost the same as a canal house in Amsterdam.
Consumer demand for tulips was at its height in 1630, and demand for flower paintings grew in line with the growing economy. Tulip drawings filled entire botanical albums. Botanical artists favored painting “broken tulips” with split petals, and striated markings, which Clusius first discovered was caused by a virus. Clusius knew that if tulips changed from their natural color, they would probably not live long. But he said of such blooms that they existed “only to delight its master’s eyes with this variety of colors before dying, as if to bid him a last farewell.”
By 1637, the tulip market had crashed, leaving many investors ruined. Scholars differ on why the market crashed, reasons range from scholars believing the market had peaked and prices couldn’t continue to rise, to others believing the bulbs were being propagated rather than imported, thus lowering the price of bulbs.
Flower Painting
Ambrosius Bosschaert was the first painter to specialize in flower still-life paintings. Around 1618, he painted a striking bouquet in size, color, and flower type titled “Vase of Flowers in a Niche.” He depicted each of the 30 different flowers true to nature. But any keen gardener can see that Bosschaert’s arrangement is a fantastical one. His symmetrical composition includes blooms that grow and blossom in different seasons and countries, and so his bouquet couldn’t flower at the same time. A practical person can also see that the arrangement is top heavy; if the bouquet was real, it would easily topple over. This over-the-top style was typical of the early flower still-life paintings.
In the 1630s, artists moved away from painting symmetrical still-life arrangements, favoring a more informal but still naturalistic composition. Hans Bollongier’s 1639 painting of a loose still-life arrangement was typical of that time.
In the second half of the 17th century, flower still lifes grew into spectacle pieces. These fantastical paintings were worlds to be discovered, full of hidden bugs, flowers, and dramatic light effects. Jan Davidsz de Heem’s 1670 vibrant painting “Vase With Flowers” is a fine spectacle in which a blue glass vase glistens with light, and caterpillars crawl and butterflies hover among familiar and exotic fruits, leaves, and blooms.
In Willem van Aelst’s “Flower Still Life With a Timepiece” a timepiece is on the table, reminding the viewer of the transience of life, a theme echoed in “vanitas” and “memento mori” paintings popular in the Netherlands at the time. It’s a theme that, naturally, extended to the fleeting nature of flower still-life paintings.
By the 1700s, the flower still-life paintings became subdued again, with painters such as Rachel Ruysch creating simpler but still stunning arrangements. Ruysch successfully painted into her 80s, and her work was owned by European royalty.
English poet and clergyman George Herbert describes the fleeting flower well in the first stanza of his poem “Life” (1633):
I made a posy while the day ran by: Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie My life within this band. But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they By noon most cunningly did steal away, And withered in my hand.
Seventeenth-century Dutch flower still-life painters froze time by immortalizing the transient flower. They remain a constant reminder of beauty and the inevitability of death.The “In Full Bloom” exhibition at the Mauritshuis in The Hague runs until June 6. To find out more, visit Mauritshuis.nl
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