Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, Jan van Huysum

Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, Jan van Huysum (1736-7).

Van Huysum’s paintings commanded extraordinary prices during his lifetime and were collected by princes and aristocrats across Europe. With its bright, light palette, this monumental work typifies the decorative shift in van Huysum’s style, which influenced flower painters throughout the 18th century.

The arrangement includes peonies, poppies, blue iris, African marigolds, apple blossom, narcissi, tulips, hyacinths, roses, ranunculi and auriculas, carnations, convolvulus, grapes, peaches and a chaffinch’s nest, in or around a terracotta vase with a relief of putti playing. The unusual shape of the canvas and the perspective of the marble base suggest that it was made to decorate a particular interior space and hung high. It is dated twice, which might indicate the length of time or the different seasons that van Huysum spent working on it.

Jan van Huysum was the last of the distinguished still life painters active in the Northern Netherlands in the 17th and early 18th centuries, and an internationally celebrated artist in his lifetime. Although he specialised in flower still lifes, van Huysum also painted a few landscapes.

His early works are more concentrated in design than his elaborate later paintings, like the Gallery's Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, with its lighter background and superabundance of detail.

Van Huysum was a native of Amsterdam and was trained, according to Arnold Houbraken, by his father