The analytic precision with which Ambrosius Bosschaert wielded his brush and the careful symbolic arrangement of specimens in his floral paintings were testaments to the zeitgeist of the Dutch Golden Age, an era of both microscopic and macrocosmic discovery.
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573–1621), a Flemish-born Dutch art dealer and painter, became known as one of the earliest painters who established the floral still life as its own independent genre. Replete with symbolism and painted with meticulous scientific accuracy, Bosschaert’s style of floral painting was perpetuated by his three sons, who all followed in their father’s footsteps, preserving the Bosschaert painting dynasty. Middelburg, the city in the southwest region of the Netherlands where Bosschaert spent most of his life, became the principal center for flower painting during the Dutch Golden Age.
A Microcosm of the World
The turn of the 16th century was permeated by an animating spirit of discovery and exploration. Hans and Zacharias Janssen, a father-and-son team of spectacle makers who were also inhabitants of Bosschaert’s Middelburg, are often credited with inventing the first compound microscope in 1595. Hans Lippershey and Jacob Metius are also known to have created telescopes in 1608.
These new inventions heralded fresh perspectives on the cosmos and broadened the culture’s view of matter. Bosschaert was sympathetic to these emergent perspectives in his still lifes, approaching his flowers and memorabilia as if they were specimens under a microscope.
Bosschaert’s “A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase” played into the elite sensibility for exotic things viewed from a scientist’s or collector’s perspective. The composition features collectibles such as shells, a Chinese Ming dynasty vase, and many living insects and bugs. It mimics a kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities). These cabinets displayed curated, encyclopedic collections of objects that belonged to diverse categories such as geology, archaeology, natural history, ethnography, religious and historical relics, and fine art. These so-called “wonder-rooms” served as predecessors to museums.
The particular blossoms in “A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase”—tulips, narcissi, cyclamens, a solitary blue iris, roses, carnations, jonquils, bluebells, fritillaries, and Madonna lilies—were not usually cut and exhibited in a vase. Rather, these flowers would have been seen in the ground or shown in a botanical garden display. An art dealer as well as a painter, Bosschaert was familiar with the local art market and sensitively attuned to the taste for the exotic that collectors had acquired. This painting was likely created to impress one of Middelburg’s wealthy burghers, Bosschaert’s premier clients. To cater to the emerging taste for natural sciences and the exotic, Bosschaert inserted many details that appealed to these novel preoccupations.
Painting on a copper surface enabled the artist to reach a level of realism that was not possible on a canvas, even with a very fine weave. This smooth surface facilitated a lustrous, even paint application, allowing Bosschaert to render the composition in intricate detail. Applying the oil paint in layers of glazes, Bosschaert created a gem-like, vivid painting that has endured without fading. While the foregrounded flowers catch the most light, the flowers in the background, rendered in shadow, serve to add a sense of depth to the composition. On the ledge, scattered next to the red admiral butterfly, is a sprig of apple blossom that appears to have fallen from the flower arrangement. Without overlaps in the bouquet, each flower is clearly visible and unfurled in its full glory.
Three bright yellow tulips with fiery streaks of red burning across their petals are prominently placed in the shape of a triangle, serving to balance the bouquet. The white Madonna lilies rise at the top of the floral arrangement, their petals harmonizing with the cool off-white of the porcelain Wan-Li vase.
Tulip Mania in the Dutch Golden Age
The Dutch obsession with the tulip—ranging from an intellectual’s scientific or medicinal interest to a collector’s taste for the exotic—was so pronounced that it culminated in an extraordinary phenomenon called “tulip mania,” a period in 17th-century Dutch history when a tulip bulb was worth the equivalent of thousands of pounds. At the apex of tulip mania in 1637, a single bulb sold for more than 10 times the yearly earnings of a seasoned craftsman. The same year, 10,000 Dutch guilders—enough to acquire a mansion on the grandest canal in Amsterdam—were offered to purchase a tulip. In his 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote that a single bulb of the Semper Augustus (a white tulip with crimson, flame-like streaks) was exchanged for 12 acres of land during the Dutch Golden Age.
The famous Semper Augustus bulb is an example of a “broken” tulip, characterized by petals that have flame-like tendrils of color streaking across their otherwise solid forms. Botanists now know that this pattern is produced by a tulip-specific mosaic virus (any type of virus that causes a mottled appearance in plant foliage) called “tulip breaking virus,” so named because it interrupts or “breaks” a pure color into at least two colors. However, in the 17th century, tulip breaking virus was not understood. What broke tulips was shrouded in mystery, and attempts to cultivate a broken tulip became ritualized games of chance.
Part of what made the Semper Augustus bulb the alluring and elusive king of tulips, even among its broken counterparts, was its scarcity. Few people ever laid their eyes on a Semper Augustus bulb. In 1624, it was recorded that only 12 instances of the ivory and crimson flowers existed and that they were all owned and jealously guarded by a single individual. Some tulip historians today believe that man to be Adriaan Pauw, director of the Dutch East India Company, grand pensionary, and owner of a plot in Heemstede. Whether it was Pauw or not, whoever held a monopoly on the limited supply stubbornly refused to sell his tulips, driving up their price still further.
While the Semper Augustus is extinct today, two years after the peak of tulip mania, Hans Bollongier captured the magnificent bulbs in his 1639 painting “Still Life With Flowers.”
Anna Pavord, UK horticultural writer, writes of the Semper Augustus in her book “The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad”: “Most often, the two colors of broken tulips ran in long, continuous stripes down the petals. But in ‘Semper Augustus’ the red colour breaks into flakes, symmetrically set round the outsides of the petals. Long before tulipomania raged, it was considered a masterpiece.”
Dutch Vanitas
The legendary and enigmatic Semper Augustus is featured front and center in Bosschaert’s “A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase.” Its red-stained petals harmonize with other crimson objects in the painting, from the fallen petals in the shadow on the ledge to the bands on the red admiral butterfly’s wings. Other insects are scattered throughout the bouquet, reminiscent of another genre of art that became prevalent during the Dutch Golden Age: vanitas painting.
“Vanitas“ is Latin for “vanity,” and vanitas painting was a genre of art meant to convey the transience of life through symbolism. In this case, vanity did not allude to narcissism, but was meant to evoke a sense of futility or pointlessness. By interspersing the bouquet with these small living creatures, Bosschaert reminds us of the cyclical relationship between pollinators and flowers. The painting thus encapsulates a full circulatory system, a miniature globe or world.
A bee explores the corona, or cup, of the yellow narcissus bloom, probing for nectar. At the apex of the composition, the glossy, brilliant surface of a Madonna lily (the bouquet’s crowning glory) is interrupted by a beetle traversing its petal. A dragonfly, with its gossamer, veiny wings overlapping the vase, rests on the burnished, golden cyclamen leaf. At left, a caterpillar inches along the stem of a tulip, weighing the bulb down and causing it to droop. A greenish-bronze butterfly, camouflaged with the leaf upon which it perches, nestles between a strand of lilies of the valley and a pink carnation.
Wan-Li Vases and Kraakporselein
Another way that the Dutch consciousness and visual imagination expanded during the Golden Age was in relation to Chinese luxury goods, most notably Chinese export ceramics.
In 1603, a Portuguese merchant ship (a 1,500-ton carrack) called “Santa Catarina” was intercepted by the Dutch East India Company off Singapore. An incredibly rich reward, profits from the carrack’s wares augmented the company’s capital by more than 50 percent. The majority of items on the Santa Catarina were Wan-Li porcelain (named after Emperor Wanli, who ruled China toward the end of the Ming Dynasty, from 1572 to 1620) and bales of Chinese raw silk. These wares were sent to Amsterdam and Middelburg, where they were auctioned at great prices.
This trade incident enkindled the Dutch (and, more broadly, European) desire for Chinese porcelain, leading to the mass production of Chinese export porcelain. Frequently appearing in Dutch still life paintings, these foreign luxuries were colloquially referred to as “kraak ware,” or “kraakporselein” in Dutch. Much scholarly ink has been spilt on the origin of this indistinct nomenclature, with some scholars arguing that it originates from the term “carrack” and others proclaiming that it derives from the Dutch verb “kraken,” meaning “to break.”
In Bosschaert’s painting, the placement of the magnificent bouquet inside a Ming dynasty porcelain is carefully curated to whet an elite’s appetite for luxury. This augments the exotic atmosphere of the composition. The blue and white porcelain vase features a bird perched on a rock, surrounded by various flora. Bosschaert frames the bird in such a way that it appears as though it might flutter off the rock and fly into the dimension of the flower arrangement. Leaves, fronds, and blooms drape over the top of the Wan-Li vase, poetically layered upon the vase’s depiction of similar foliage. In this way, Bosschaert plays with the viewer of the painting, demonstrating his aptitude for convincingly simulating the textures of foliage painted on porcelain within a broader floral composition, conveying a world within a world.
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s student and brother-in-law Balthasar van der Ast featured a similar Wan-Li vase in a still life painting from the 1620s entitled “Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase.” Completed nearly a decade after Bosschaert’s painting, Van der Ast’s composition includes many of the same elements that are present in his brother-in-law’s composition. At the apex of his bouquet, where Bosschaert had allowed the Madonna lilies to erupt in flourishes of white, Van der Ast prominently features a single splendid broken tulip. Not quite the famous Semper Augustus, the colorful centerpiece of Van der Ast’s painting is an unfurling golden bulb with crimson flames licking the petals in fiery streaks.
While both Bosschaert and Van der Ast were successful painters, it is unlikely that either of them could afford to pay the astronomical prices that the Wan-Li vases were fetching at auction. It is more likely that the brothers-in-law each made multiple sketches of a vase at the home of the vase’s owner, then conceptually arranged these images in their final compositions.
