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Lot Essay
Religious and mythological scenes enwreathed with elaborate garlands of fruit, vegetables and flowers enjoyed enormous popularity in the southern Netherlands in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, and both Jan Breughels, father and son, produced many successful compositions in collaboration with Hendrick van Balen, Pieter von Avont, and Rubens himself. The format presented artists with the opportunity to combine figure painting, landscape and detailed still life elements in a single composition, and to pair the best of their skills with those of another master, in collaboration but also in competition. Van Balen had already worked extensively with Jan Breughel the Elder, and as such, the Younger had already met and brought various works to completion with him. Their partnership intensified, however, when Jan the Elder died in the cholera epidemic in 1625 and Jan the Younger returned from his trip to Italy (1622-1625) to take over his father's studio. He completed several of his father's unfinished works, and maintained the practices and partnerships established by him, including that with van Balen, who had been an executor of the Elder's estate.
The earliest of these flower garland scenes is probably that painted by Jan Breughel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen in 1607/8 for Cardinal Borromeo in Milan, today in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. The present compositional type, with its distinctive U-shaped garland, seems to have been developed around 1617-18, and the prototype by Jan Breughel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen is likely the painting of circa 1618-22 in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (fig. 1; inv. no. 233). A comparable example by the Younger and van Balen, formerly in the collection of Baron Evence Coppée (Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 2014, lot 16, £434,500), is datable to circa 1630. The format continued to enjoy commercial success, but by the 1640s this type of devotional garland had started to be replaced by the more austere festooned cartouches painted by the Jesuit artist Daniel Seghers (1590–1661) and his followers.
Wonderfully extravagant bowers teeming with dozens of varieties of fruits, vegetables, plants, flora and fauna encircle the central scene in this painting, where the Virgin sits in repose with the Christ Child on her knee, accompanied by Joseph, the Infant Saint John the Baptist and putti. In the foreground, angels harvest fruit and vegetables from the garlands, where monkeys and birds look out from the foliage. The twelve putti along the top of the scene represent the months of the year, and the varieties of fruit and vegetables hail from all seasons. The devotional scene is complemented by the garlands: the fecundity of nature being divine in origin. Cardinal Borromeo, for whom the Ambrosiana version was painted, wrote that fruit and vegetables: 'make known to us the great wisdom and exquisiteness of Divine Providence, surely their abundance and very great variety will be able to lead us to see their liberality and generous heart of this so magnanimous and so splendid a donor' (see P.M. Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-century Milan, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, p. 86, citing a passage from the Cardinal's I tre libri delle Laudi Divine, Milan, 1632, p. 158). Breughel’s remarkable talents for the realistic and highly detailed depiction of flora and fauna, combined with van Balen’s sensitively rendered figures, creates a devotional scene of great beauty and effect.
The earliest of these flower garland scenes is probably that painted by Jan Breughel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen in 1607/8 for Cardinal Borromeo in Milan, today in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. The present compositional type, with its distinctive U-shaped garland, seems to have been developed around 1617-18, and the prototype by Jan Breughel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen is likely the painting of circa 1618-22 in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (fig. 1; inv. no. 233). A comparable example by the Younger and van Balen, formerly in the collection of Baron Evence Coppée (Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 2014, lot 16, £434,500), is datable to circa 1630. The format continued to enjoy commercial success, but by the 1640s this type of devotional garland had started to be replaced by the more austere festooned cartouches painted by the Jesuit artist Daniel Seghers (1590–1661) and his followers.
Wonderfully extravagant bowers teeming with dozens of varieties of fruits, vegetables, plants, flora and fauna encircle the central scene in this painting, where the Virgin sits in repose with the Christ Child on her knee, accompanied by Joseph, the Infant Saint John the Baptist and putti. In the foreground, angels harvest fruit and vegetables from the garlands, where monkeys and birds look out from the foliage. The twelve putti along the top of the scene represent the months of the year, and the varieties of fruit and vegetables hail from all seasons. The devotional scene is complemented by the garlands: the fecundity of nature being divine in origin. Cardinal Borromeo, for whom the Ambrosiana version was painted, wrote that fruit and vegetables: 'make known to us the great wisdom and exquisiteness of Divine Providence, surely their abundance and very great variety will be able to lead us to see their liberality and generous heart of this so magnanimous and so splendid a donor' (see P.M. Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-century Milan, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, p. 86, citing a passage from the Cardinal's I tre libri delle Laudi Divine, Milan, 1632, p. 158). Breughel’s remarkable talents for the realistic and highly detailed depiction of flora and fauna, combined with van Balen’s sensitively rendered figures, creates a devotional scene of great beauty and effect.