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拍品專文
Strikingly modern in its elegant verticality and economical design, this still life of luxurious flowers in a porcelain vase is an early work by Balthasar van der Ast. On the basis of first-hand inspection at the time of the 2008 sale, Dr. Fred G. Meijer dated the work to 1624-25, when the painter was working in Utrecht and was at the height of his observational and technical abilities. Like Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, the artist's brother-in-law, under whom he had trained in Middelburg, van der Ast meticulously studied flowers from life, combining varieties of specimens from different countries and seasons into one fantastical moment of blooming.
The quiet refinement of van der Ast’s panel betrays nothing of the frantic atmosphere of speculation and competition in which it was created. The popularly termed ‘Tulip mania’, which swept the Netherlands during the 1620s and ‘30s, saw the fervid importation, production and sale of countless varieties of tulips as an emerging wealthy merchant class sought to own and grow new, strikingly coloured types of the flower. In 1624, offers for as much as 2,000 or 3,000 guilders (the equivalent of the average annual earnings of a wealthy merchant) were being rejected by tulip merchants (M. Dash, Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions it Aroused, London, 1999, p. 94). So-called ‘broken’ tulips - those infected with the virus which gave them their variegated colours, such as the one portrayed in van der Ast’s painting at upper centre - were the most popular new varieties.
The present painting can be grouped with similar still lifes of flowers in Wan-li porcelain vases that van der Ast painted in the 1620s. The vases that appear in these works are similar in design, but not identical: their decorative patterns and gilt bronze mounts vary from painting to painting. Accordingly, Meijer proposes that rather than being accurate representations of a studio prop, it is more likely that van der Ast’s vessels are inventions of the artist based on his general idea of what a late Ming vase looked like (F.G. Meijer, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Catalogue of the Collection of Paintings. The Collection of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painting Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward, Zwolle, 2003, p. 159). In this group are the 1623 Vase of flowers in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and one sold in these Rooms, 8 December 2005, lot 11.
The quiet refinement of van der Ast’s panel betrays nothing of the frantic atmosphere of speculation and competition in which it was created. The popularly termed ‘Tulip mania’, which swept the Netherlands during the 1620s and ‘30s, saw the fervid importation, production and sale of countless varieties of tulips as an emerging wealthy merchant class sought to own and grow new, strikingly coloured types of the flower. In 1624, offers for as much as 2,000 or 3,000 guilders (the equivalent of the average annual earnings of a wealthy merchant) were being rejected by tulip merchants (M. Dash, Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions it Aroused, London, 1999, p. 94). So-called ‘broken’ tulips - those infected with the virus which gave them their variegated colours, such as the one portrayed in van der Ast’s painting at upper centre - were the most popular new varieties.
The present painting can be grouped with similar still lifes of flowers in Wan-li porcelain vases that van der Ast painted in the 1620s. The vases that appear in these works are similar in design, but not identical: their decorative patterns and gilt bronze mounts vary from painting to painting. Accordingly, Meijer proposes that rather than being accurate representations of a studio prop, it is more likely that van der Ast’s vessels are inventions of the artist based on his general idea of what a late Ming vase looked like (F.G. Meijer, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Catalogue of the Collection of Paintings. The Collection of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painting Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward, Zwolle, 2003, p. 159). In this group are the 1623 Vase of flowers in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and one sold in these Rooms, 8 December 2005, lot 11.