A Vase with Flowers

A Vase with Flowers

Diagram of flowers depicted

A Vase with Flowers

Artist:Jacob Vosmaer (Dutch, Delft ca. 1584–1641 Delft)
Date:probably 1613
Medium:Oil on wood
Dimensions:33 1/2 x 24 5/8 in. (85.1 x 62.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Purchase, 1871

The Delft painter Jacob Vosmaer was an early if not pioneering specialist in the painting of flower pictures, which often depict rare specimens known to the artists solely from illustrated books. At some time before 1870 this panel was trimmed on the sides and cut down (about nine inches) at the top, cropping the crown imperial.

Catalogue Entry

In this early example of flower painting in the Netherlands, a bouquet of rare flowers is arranged in an earthenware pot that is set into a large stone niche. The panel has been trimmed on both sides, and cut down at the top by nearly a quarter of the composition's original height (see Mahon 1993/94). The picture's design was originally quite similar to that of Vosmaer's Still Life of Flowers with a Fritillary in a Stone Niche (private collection, Amsterdam), which shows an ample volume of space around the pot of flowers and the curved wall of the niche advancing in sunlight to the chipped edge of a wall on the right. This frontal element, the worn stone sill at the bottom, and the strong shadows cast by flowers on the pot and by the bouquet on the background create a sense of illusionistic space to a degree rarely found in contemporary Dutch or Flemish flower pictures.
In The Met's painting, by contrast, flowers nearly fill the upper half of the picture field, and the crown imperial at the top (which was restored by referring to the painting in Amsterdam) is abruptly cut by the frame, all of which tends to emphasize the panel's surface rather than recession in space. In addressing this problem, a virtue was made of necessity when the picture was provided with a seventeenth-century red tortoiseshell frame, which pulls the colorful whole together as a decorative ensemble. But the effect at a normal viewing distance is surely quite different from that intended by the artist. In a domestic interior of the period, the Amsterdam panel, with its life-size motifs flooded by a consistent fall of light, must have created the impression of a real bouquet filling an actual niche in the wall.
Although the arrangements in the Amsterdam and New York paintings are hardly identical, a number of flowers are repeated in the same positions, such as the five largest flowers at the bottom of the bouquet, and the flame tulip and crown imperial (a kind of fritillary) at top center. In the present picture, a lizard occupies the lower right corner, a different petal curves over the edge of the sill, and a fallen sprig to the left replaces the mouse seen in the Amsterdam painting.
The wood supports of the two pictures are more intimately related than are the images they bear. X-radiographs indicate that the central boards of tropical wood—vertical planks about 24 inches (61 cm) wide—match precisely in grain and knotholes. This means that a single board about 1/2 inch (1.27 cm) thick was split to make two thin boards. Narrow strips of oak were added to the lateral sides of the central board to make each panel. At some later date (perhaps in the eighteenth century), the New York panel was cut nearly to the join of the oak strip and central panel on the right, slightly into the tropical wood on the left, and by as much as 10 inches (25.4 cm) at the top.
That two closely related compositions were painted on wood panels crafted at the same time suggests that the pictures must have been executed either simultaneously or in immediate succession. Until its recent conservation, the Amsterdam panel was said to be dated 1618, but the most likely reading (according to the conservator responsible) now appears to be 1613. The last digit of the date on the New York painting was read in the past as a 5 (beginning with Decamps 1872, who mistook the support for copper). The digit is now illegible. The numbers 3 and 5, as inscribed on seventeenth-century Netherlandish pictures, have often been misread by modern viewers. In any case, it appears probable that both pictures were completed in or about 1613.
The two paintings were hung side by side in the New York venue of the exhibition Vermeer and the Delft School in 2001. They appeared entirely consistent in style and quality, allowing for their very different states of preservation. Liedtke (2001) suggests that the paintings may have been made as pendants, considering that their fictive niches would have complemented each other in an architectural ensemble, and that the specially made panels might have been intended for a particular patron. However, in the absence of documentation it seems equally or indeed more plausible that Vosmaer, like other still-life painters of the period, was simply producing versions of a successful design in an efficient manner. Greater variety in the bouquets, and in the type or presentation of the heavy pot (which is probably German stoneware), would be expected if the panels were meant to be seen as a pair.
The painter may never have seen a few of the flowers that are depicted here, but would have relied on printed sources such as Rembert Dodoens's Stirpium historiae pemptades sex (Antwerp, 1583) or representations by other artists. Dodoens illustrates one fritillary and describes another (imported from "Eastern parts") that he had seen seven years earlier in the garden of Emperor Maximilian in Vienna. The other flowers were cultivated in the Netherlands, or, in the case of the striped and flame tulips and the pink double hollyhocks (partly preserved at top left), had only recently been introduced from abroad. Vosmaer also includes roses, irises, a red anemone (just to the left of the butterfly on the flame tulip at bottom center), and, to its left, a type of fritillary commonly called a snake's head (see fig. 1 above). The colors of some of the flowers are reflected in the shiny surface of the pot, where the white rose casts an emphatic shadow.
Other artists preceded Vosmaer in painting this type of composition. Roelant Savery (1576–1639), from no later than 1603 onward, set similar bouquets in stone niches, with lizards, insects, and fallen petals on a sill, and by 1615 (if not earlier) was producing looser arrangements in more spacious settings, rather as in the original state of The Met's picture. Comparable works were also painted by Jacques de Gheyn the Elder. Vosmaer recalls De Gheyn in his comparatively fluid manner of execution. The two artists lived no more than an hour apart (by boat or on foot), in Delft and The Hague, respectively. The Delft flower painter Elias Verhulst (died 1601) was also presumably important for Vosmaer, to judge from Hendrick Hondius's 1599 engraving after his design (Albertina, Vienna). The sheer variety of flowers and the apparent originality of the open-arched composition (which evidently anticipates designs by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder [1573–1621]) suggest that Verhulst was an influential figure in the area of Delft and The Hague.
Cut flowers and chipped stone intimate that all things pass away, no matter how fresh or durable, but the main interest of Vosmaer's painting for his contemporaries would have been not symbolism but botany and, more broadly, the wonders of nature, where God creates forms that humankind can only catalogue and imitate.
[2016; adapted from Liedtke 2007]

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