Jan van Huysum was the most famous still-life painter of his day. Born in Amsterdam, the son of a still-life painter and brother of three others, he seems to have never left his native city. Little is known of his life and he seems to have worked in strict seclusion, jealously guarding the secrets of his technique. Margareta Haverman was his only recorded pupil. His style combines a painstakingly perfectionist technique with an insistance on working direct from nature, which sometimes required him to wait until the next season for fresh blooms. In a letter of 1742 he wrote 'The flower piece is coming on well; I could not procure a yellow rose last year, otherwise it would have been finished; the grapes, figs and pomegranate still have to be painted in the fruit piece' (quoted by S. Segal in the catalogue of the exhibition, Flowers and Nature, Osaka, Tokyo and Sydney, 1990, p. 241); some of his pictures are dated twice, a year apart. Van Huysum enjoyed enormous success in his lifetime, receiving commissions from a number of European monarchs and commanding high prices. His paintings were among the most expensive in the world until well into the nineteenth century.

Many of Van Huysum's still-lifes were executed as pendants consisting of a flower piece and a fruit piece with flowers; a significant proportion of these have since been separated. The present panels are datable to the mid-1720s by comparison with such works as the pair from Houghton Hall, now in the Hermitage, which are dated 1722 and 1723 (Y. Kuznetsov and I. Linnik, Dutch Painting in Soviet Museums, Amsterdam and Leningrad, 1982, colour pls. 286-7) and the fruit and flower piece of 1722 in the J. Paul Getty Museum (for which see below). The way in which the signature in the present flower piece is partially obscured by the bunch of auricula in order to heighten the illusionistic effect is a trademark of Van Huysum's work, as is the 'Van Huysum' rose, a yellow cabbage rose which was evidently difficult to cultivate and is unknown today; the flower piece of 1722 in the Hermitage is the first dated work in which Van Huysum depicted this hybrid which was to bear his name.

The Van Loon Collection, purchased en bloc by Baron Lionel de Rothschild in 1878, included Rembrandt's pair of lifesize portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit of 1634 (see, for instance, the catalogue of the exhibition, Rembrandt: the Master and his Workshop - Paintings, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and National Gallery, London, 1991-2, nos. 17-18), Pieter de Hooch's A Woman with a Glass of Wine and a Child in a Garden (P. C. Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, Oxford, 1980, no. 38, pl. 41), Gabriel Metsu's A Baker blowing his Horn at a Casement (F. W. Robinson, Gabriel Metsu, New York, 1974, fig. 40), Willem van Mieris' Portrait of Agatha Paedts (O. Naumann, Frans van Mieris the Elder, Doornspijk, 1981, no. 60, pl. 60) and the Ludolf Backhuizen Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee sold in these Rooms, 10 December 1993, lot 19. It also included two larger panels by Jan van Huysum, both dated 1722, which passed by descent to Edmund de Rothschild and are now in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Hofstede de Groot, op. cit., nos. 62 and 207; Grant, op. cit., nos. 22 and 166, pl. 6; B. B. Fredericksen, Masterpieces of Painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, 1988, no. 29, both illustrated in colour)