A festoon of flowers surrounding an image of the Annunciation

Daniel Seghers was born in Antwerp in 1590. After his father’s death, he moved with his mother to Holland where he was brought up in the Protestant faith. He returned to Antwerp in 1610 and became a pupil of Jan Brueghel the Elder, who is thought to have converted him to Catholicism. Seghers enrolled in the Antwerp guild in 1611 and in 1614 was admitted to the Jesuit order as a novice. He took his final vows as a lay brother in 1625 and was sent to the Order in Rome until 1627. After his return, he remained in Antwerp until his death in 1661.

His oeuvre consists entirely of flower pieces made up, according to his own checklist, of bloempottekens (flower still lifes), festons (festoons), kransens (wreaths) and cartelles (cartouches). Seghers regularly collaborated with several artists, including Cornelis Schut, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Simon de Vos and Erasmus Quellinus, who painted the central narrative scenes but seldom signed their work. The handling of the Annunciation scene in the present painting is close to that of Schut, to whom it may plausibly be attributed. The present painting, executed on a large sheet of copper, is particularly interesting because it retains its original backing board incised with the monogram ‘IHS’ and cross of the Society of Jesus (fig. 1).

We are grateful to Fred Meijer for endorsing the attribution of the flowers on the basis of photographs and for dating the painting to circa 1640.