.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1663, this refined and luminous work stands as one of the most sophisticated inventions within Nicolaes van Veerendael’s oeuvre. Belonging to the distinguished Antwerp tradition of garland paintings – a genre conceived in the early seventeenth century by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen, and elevated by Daniel Seghers in collaboration with Rubens and Erasmus Quellinus – the present panel exemplifies the late flowering of that tradition, when the devotional centre gave way to secular portraiture for a patrician clientele.
While Veerendael’s name is most often associated with devotional or allegorical garland pieces, this composition departs strikingly from his norm. Within the artist’s known corpus, few examples integrate a completed portrait, and none with such consummate harmony between still-life and figure. A closely related work at Dyrham Park (National Trust, inv. no. 453741), likewise dated 1663, displays a comparable floral surround but leaves the cartouche unpainted – evidence that the artist prepared panels for subsequent completion by a collaborating portraitist. The present picture, however, carries this collaboration to its elegant conclusion: the floral framework fully realised and the central portrait exquisitely complete.
The youthful sitter, poised and self-possessed, holds a fan with restrained grace, her blue satin dress softly lit from the upper left. The serenity of her expression contrasts with the vivid exuberance of the surrounding blossoms, which cascade across the dark ground in abundant swags of tulips, roses, peonies, anemones, narcissi and morning glories – a profusion uniting spring and summer, nature and artifice, in an impossible perpetual bloom. Such combinations appealed to the connoisseurial taste of mid-seventeenth-century Antwerp, where collectors prized botanical variety as a sign of erudition and worldly experience. Yet, as in Veerendael’s vanitas pieces, splendour is subtly tempered: a drooping stem, a fallen petal and the faint wilting of a leaf all serve to remind the viewer of the transience of beauty and the brevity of youth.
The portrait itself has been variously attributed, including proposals for Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, with affinities also noted to Gonzales Coques, the so-called ‘little Van Dyck’. Such collaboration would align with Antwerp workshop practice, where flower specialists and figure painters frequently joined forces to meet the tastes of an urbane and affluent clientele. The synthesis here is remarkably cohesive: the figure is fully integrated within the pictorial space, neither inserted nor isolated, but encircled by blooms that seem to breathe the same air.
Veerendael’s signature and date, inscribed with characteristic precision, affirm his authorship of the floral elements. Contemporary accounts attest to the extraordinary deliberation of his working method. Jacob Campo Weyerman, well acquainted with Antwerp studio lore, records Veerendael telling a visiting patron that he had ‘laboured over these red roses for eight weeks, and sat for four days brushing colour on the poppies’ (De levens-beschryvingen der Nederlandsche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, III, ’s-Gravenhage, 1729, p. 236). That discipline is borne out here in the dewy sheen of petals, the crisp reflections on glassy surfaces and the minute textures of foliage, all executed with near-scientific fidelity.
Born in Antwerp in 1640 and admitted to the Guild of Saint Luke by 1657, Veerendael achieved early renown for his still-lifes of flowers and vanitas subjects, frequently collaborating with Jan Davidsz. de Heem, David Teniers the Younger and the younger members of the Francken dynasty. His paintings were esteemed not only for their technical refinement but also for their moral undertone – a balance of splendour and sobriety that reflected the Counter-Reformation sensibility of his milieu. Through pupils such as Jean-Baptiste Morel, his influence persisted well into the eighteenth century.
The present panel was likely commissioned to mark a familial rite of passage – an engagement or coming-of-age – when the substitution of a secular portrait for a devotional image signified prosperity and modernity. The sacred visual rhetoric of the garland, once reserved for the Madonna, here exalts a mortal likeness, transforming private commemoration through the visual language of divine beauty.
Its exceptional state of preservation, doubtless owing to its descent in the same family since the late nineteenth century, makes this painting one of very few surviving garland portraits by Veerendael in such intact condition. Its rarity is matched by its refinement: a perfect synthesis of portraiture and still-life, emblem and likeness. Seen today, much as it would have appeared in 1663, the painting embodies the moment when Antwerp’s grand pictorial traditions – devotional, allegorical, and floral – converged in the service of private commemoration, affirming Veerendael’s mastery at the threshold between the sacred and the secular.
While Veerendael’s name is most often associated with devotional or allegorical garland pieces, this composition departs strikingly from his norm. Within the artist’s known corpus, few examples integrate a completed portrait, and none with such consummate harmony between still-life and figure. A closely related work at Dyrham Park (National Trust, inv. no. 453741), likewise dated 1663, displays a comparable floral surround but leaves the cartouche unpainted – evidence that the artist prepared panels for subsequent completion by a collaborating portraitist. The present picture, however, carries this collaboration to its elegant conclusion: the floral framework fully realised and the central portrait exquisitely complete.
The youthful sitter, poised and self-possessed, holds a fan with restrained grace, her blue satin dress softly lit from the upper left. The serenity of her expression contrasts with the vivid exuberance of the surrounding blossoms, which cascade across the dark ground in abundant swags of tulips, roses, peonies, anemones, narcissi and morning glories – a profusion uniting spring and summer, nature and artifice, in an impossible perpetual bloom. Such combinations appealed to the connoisseurial taste of mid-seventeenth-century Antwerp, where collectors prized botanical variety as a sign of erudition and worldly experience. Yet, as in Veerendael’s vanitas pieces, splendour is subtly tempered: a drooping stem, a fallen petal and the faint wilting of a leaf all serve to remind the viewer of the transience of beauty and the brevity of youth.
The portrait itself has been variously attributed, including proposals for Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, with affinities also noted to Gonzales Coques, the so-called ‘little Van Dyck’. Such collaboration would align with Antwerp workshop practice, where flower specialists and figure painters frequently joined forces to meet the tastes of an urbane and affluent clientele. The synthesis here is remarkably cohesive: the figure is fully integrated within the pictorial space, neither inserted nor isolated, but encircled by blooms that seem to breathe the same air.
Veerendael’s signature and date, inscribed with characteristic precision, affirm his authorship of the floral elements. Contemporary accounts attest to the extraordinary deliberation of his working method. Jacob Campo Weyerman, well acquainted with Antwerp studio lore, records Veerendael telling a visiting patron that he had ‘laboured over these red roses for eight weeks, and sat for four days brushing colour on the poppies’ (De levens-beschryvingen der Nederlandsche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, III, ’s-Gravenhage, 1729, p. 236). That discipline is borne out here in the dewy sheen of petals, the crisp reflections on glassy surfaces and the minute textures of foliage, all executed with near-scientific fidelity.
Born in Antwerp in 1640 and admitted to the Guild of Saint Luke by 1657, Veerendael achieved early renown for his still-lifes of flowers and vanitas subjects, frequently collaborating with Jan Davidsz. de Heem, David Teniers the Younger and the younger members of the Francken dynasty. His paintings were esteemed not only for their technical refinement but also for their moral undertone – a balance of splendour and sobriety that reflected the Counter-Reformation sensibility of his milieu. Through pupils such as Jean-Baptiste Morel, his influence persisted well into the eighteenth century.
The present panel was likely commissioned to mark a familial rite of passage – an engagement or coming-of-age – when the substitution of a secular portrait for a devotional image signified prosperity and modernity. The sacred visual rhetoric of the garland, once reserved for the Madonna, here exalts a mortal likeness, transforming private commemoration through the visual language of divine beauty.
Its exceptional state of preservation, doubtless owing to its descent in the same family since the late nineteenth century, makes this painting one of very few surviving garland portraits by Veerendael in such intact condition. Its rarity is matched by its refinement: a perfect synthesis of portraiture and still-life, emblem and likeness. Seen today, much as it would have appeared in 1663, the painting embodies the moment when Antwerp’s grand pictorial traditions – devotional, allegorical, and floral – converged in the service of private commemoration, affirming Veerendael’s mastery at the threshold between the sacred and the secular.