Catalogue Roberti Fine Art, TEFAF Maastricht 2026 (1) compressed - Flipbook - Page 112
This elegant floral still life was painted by the inventor of flower painting in The Netherlands,
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. Known for having worked in the relatively secluded yet wealthy
Zeeland city of Middelburg, Bosschaert's pioneering still lifes were created in isolation from his
contemporaries Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) in Antwerp and Roelandt Savery (1576-1639) in
Prague. Zeeland was the Dutch East India Company’s second largest regional office, after
Amsterdam, and as such was an important centre for the import of exotic goods such as nonEuropean flowers, or the beautiful shells seen here. Middelburg’s numerous botanical gardens
were celebrated, the earliest being that of Matthias Lobelius as early as 1590. It is surely in these
gardens that Bosschaert began to study and paint the flowers which he was to capture so joyfully
throughout his career and especially in the present work, which is signed in monogram and
datable to the final years of his ground-breaking and prolific career.
Recently dated by Dr Fred G. Meijer, the leading scholar in the field of Dutch and Flemish still lifes,
to around 1619-21, and described by him as a characteristic late work by Bosschaert the Elder, this
painting was executed, when the artist had settled in Breda and his work had become more
naturalistic, with softer petals and more informal arrangements of the bouquets. Meijer compares
various elements in this picture with a Still Life by Bosschaert dated 1619 in the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art (fig. 1).¹ Some of the same sprigs and flowers feature in both, as does the
beautifully painted small yellow shell. Other analogous floral elements - including the pansies, lilyof-the-valley and cranesbill - are found in a still life dated to the last year of Bosschaert's life in the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (fig. 2).² This comparison was first drawn by Sam Segal,
who noted that some of the same flower motifs, such as the pansy and the lily-of-the-valley appear
also in the Washington painting, while the cranesbill features in reverse.³
In his book on the Bosschaert dynasty, Laurens Johannes Bol remarks on the fact that these final
years of the Elder's painting career were particularly productive.t It was during this period when
the artist had forsaken the worldly cares of Utrecht, alongside the continual civil cases relating to
the collection of debts, that he found himself in a more tranquil situation in the south. In the
present still life, the symphony of rich purples and reds, contrasted with the staccato additions of
blues and yellows, is reminiscent of the
