A parrot tulip, a rose, an iris and insects on a wooden table

After training as a painter under the German still-life master, Georg Flegel, Jakob Marrel traveled to Utrecht, where he perfected his still-life techniques under the influence of Ambrosius Bosschaert I, Roelandt Savery and Jan Davidsz. de Heem. In addition to his work as a painter, Marrel was known to act as an art and tulip-bulb dealer. During the 1630s and 1640s Marrel executed at least six tulip books, documenting the numerous varieties created through selective breeding, three of which remain intact. The tulip in the present painting appears to be the voorwint (‘with the wind’) variety, as documented by Marrel in a page form a tulip book dated circa 1635 now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no. 69.66, fig. 1).

Marrel tended to arrange his compositions with a floral bouquet, organized around a central tulip or lily in a slickly painted vase; unusually the present painting displays just a few stems arranged on a table ledge. This compositional type appears on only a few occasions in Marrel’s oeuvre. The table top compositions include detailed depictions of insects, a special interest of his step-daughter Maria Sibylla Merian, whom he encouraged to draw and later trained to become an artist. Merian went on to become a naturalist, and published entomological books containing her natural illustrations on the subjects of caterpillars, insect metamorphosis, and, later, on the insects of Suriname following a trip there with the Dutch West India Company.