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Lot Essay
This luminous work demonstrates in brilliant detail Ambrosius Bosschaert's ability to combine an almost forensic study of individual flowers and insects with his characteristically elegant composition, coloring and execution.
Bosschaert, along with his contemporaries Jan Breughel I, Jacques de Gheyn II and Roelandt Savery, pioneered the genre of flower painting in the Netherlands during the early years of the seventeenth century. Here, in a centrally placed glass beaker, Bosschaert has carefully arranged a vibrant bouquet of intricately painted blooms including tulips, wild roses, cyclamen, yellow ranunculus, and forget-me-nots. The beaker is placed on a stone ledge and silhouetted against a dark background serving to focus the viewer’s attention on the jewel-like bouquet.
After being forced to leave his native city of Antwerp in 1587, following religious persecution, Bosschaert settled in Middelburg. At this period, the city boasted some of the most comprehensive collections of flora in Holland and, during the last decades of the sixteenth century, emerged as a leading center for the developing field of botany and the scientific study of plants. It was here, for example, that pioneering botanists like Matthias de l’Obel made systematic attempts to classify and catalogue plants according to their natural affinities, rather than their perceived medical uses as had previously been the norm. His Icones stirpium, seu, Plantarum tam exoticarum, quam indigenarum (‘Images of plants, both exotic and native, for students of botany’), published in 1591, was one of a number of books featuring extensive scientific engravings of plants, which provided important models for painters like Bosschaert. Indeed, it is possible that Bosschaert himself, during his early years in Middelburg, was employed to create similarly technical watercolor ‘portraits’ of individual blooms. These studies may well have served as later models for his finished paintings.
The emerging interest in botany at the turn of the seventeenth century saw wealthy and educated collectors increasingly seek out rare and unusual blooms. The increasing competition and desire for these flowers resulted in the popularly termed ‘Tulip mania’, which swept the Netherlands during the 1620s and ‘30s. This period saw the fervent production and sale of different varieties of tulips commanding soaring prices (reaching as much as 2,000 or 3,000 guilders in 1624, the equivalent of a wealthy merchant’s average annual earnings) as collectors competitively sought to own and grow new, strikingly colored types of the tulip. The most prized of these flowers were the so-called ‘broken’ variety which were infected with a virus to give them dramatically variegated colors. The prominent yellow and red tulip at the summit of Bosschaert’s painting is such a type, sometimes referred to as a Bizzarden (bizarre) variety. These specimens were often carefully reproduced in watercolor or drawings in a similar mode to Bosschaert’s own studies of individual flowers, to produce, effectively, catalogues for buyers, advertising the spectacular coloring of new varieties of flowers (fig. 1). Concurrent with this desire for living specimens was the desire for painted ‘flower pieces’, which, unlike the flowers themselves, were constantly in bloom and enabled the painter to combine flowers that grew at different times of the year into fictive compositions.
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
Herbert Girardet hailed from an esteemed Huguenot family. His forebearer, Wilhelm Girardet (1838–1918), founded a printing press in Essen which evolved into a newspaper publishing business. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, Herbert Girardet assembled an impressive collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings. He had a particular fondness for small paintings on copper, such as the present work which was acquired just a year prior to the public exhibition of his collection.
Bosschaert, along with his contemporaries Jan Breughel I, Jacques de Gheyn II and Roelandt Savery, pioneered the genre of flower painting in the Netherlands during the early years of the seventeenth century. Here, in a centrally placed glass beaker, Bosschaert has carefully arranged a vibrant bouquet of intricately painted blooms including tulips, wild roses, cyclamen, yellow ranunculus, and forget-me-nots. The beaker is placed on a stone ledge and silhouetted against a dark background serving to focus the viewer’s attention on the jewel-like bouquet.
After being forced to leave his native city of Antwerp in 1587, following religious persecution, Bosschaert settled in Middelburg. At this period, the city boasted some of the most comprehensive collections of flora in Holland and, during the last decades of the sixteenth century, emerged as a leading center for the developing field of botany and the scientific study of plants. It was here, for example, that pioneering botanists like Matthias de l’Obel made systematic attempts to classify and catalogue plants according to their natural affinities, rather than their perceived medical uses as had previously been the norm. His Icones stirpium, seu, Plantarum tam exoticarum, quam indigenarum (‘Images of plants, both exotic and native, for students of botany’), published in 1591, was one of a number of books featuring extensive scientific engravings of plants, which provided important models for painters like Bosschaert. Indeed, it is possible that Bosschaert himself, during his early years in Middelburg, was employed to create similarly technical watercolor ‘portraits’ of individual blooms. These studies may well have served as later models for his finished paintings.
The emerging interest in botany at the turn of the seventeenth century saw wealthy and educated collectors increasingly seek out rare and unusual blooms. The increasing competition and desire for these flowers resulted in the popularly termed ‘Tulip mania’, which swept the Netherlands during the 1620s and ‘30s. This period saw the fervent production and sale of different varieties of tulips commanding soaring prices (reaching as much as 2,000 or 3,000 guilders in 1624, the equivalent of a wealthy merchant’s average annual earnings) as collectors competitively sought to own and grow new, strikingly colored types of the tulip. The most prized of these flowers were the so-called ‘broken’ variety which were infected with a virus to give them dramatically variegated colors. The prominent yellow and red tulip at the summit of Bosschaert’s painting is such a type, sometimes referred to as a Bizzarden (bizarre) variety. These specimens were often carefully reproduced in watercolor or drawings in a similar mode to Bosschaert’s own studies of individual flowers, to produce, effectively, catalogues for buyers, advertising the spectacular coloring of new varieties of flowers (fig. 1). Concurrent with this desire for living specimens was the desire for painted ‘flower pieces’, which, unlike the flowers themselves, were constantly in bloom and enabled the painter to combine flowers that grew at different times of the year into fictive compositions.
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
Herbert Girardet hailed from an esteemed Huguenot family. His forebearer, Wilhelm Girardet (1838–1918), founded a printing press in Essen which evolved into a newspaper publishing business. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, Herbert Girardet assembled an impressive collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings. He had a particular fondness for small paintings on copper, such as the present work which was acquired just a year prior to the public exhibition of his collection.