Roses and other flowers in a terracotta vase with a bird’s nest on a marble ledge; and Fruit, roses and peonies in a basket with hazelnuts on a marble ledge

These two beautifully preserved paintings are the last known works in the career of an artist who was, in the words of the eminent scholar of still-life paintings Ingvar Bergström, ‘the greatest of all flower-painters’ (I. Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, London, 1961, p. 226). Though van Huysum also painted classicising landscapes, his reputation today chiefly rests on the roughly 250 luxuriously composed flower and fruit arrangements. Though earlier in his career van Huysum tended to set his floral bouquets against dark backdrops (fig. 1), there is a significant shift in palette in his later paintings, which are frequently conceived in brightly-lit spaces and sometimes include a landscape background. These works earned him the adoration of contemporaries like the artist and theorist Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677-1747), who described him as ‘De Fenix aller bloemschilders’ (‘the Phoenix of all flower painters’; J. Weyerman, De Levens-beschryvingen der Nederlandtsche konst-schilders…, The Hague, 1750, p. 210).

The compositions of these two paintings relate to a highly comparable pair of flower and fruit pieces executed on copper and dated 1742 and 1743 respectively, in the collection of the Staatliches Museum Schwerin (figs. 2 and 3). In both instances, the floral still life is arranged in a similar, though not identical, terracotta vase with putti and bird’s nest at lower right. The vase in the present flower still life - which contrasts with the pendant picture's tightly-woven basket - features cherubs and a goat, together with grapes on a vine, all of which serve to underline the paintings' Bacchic overtones. The sinuous S-shaped composition of the floral bouquet in each pair is accentuated by a creeping morning glory stem at lower left and one or two prominent flowers at upper right: a brilliant red opium poppy here and a pair of pink roses in the painting in Schwerin. The compositions of the two fruit pieces are even more similar. The artist has employed the same open-topped, rectangular woven wicker box in each. The centre of both compositions are anchored by a bunch of green grapes whose broken vine tendril emphasises the painting’s diagonal compositional arrangement. Behind this are arranged a group of white roses. The foreground is equally similar with, from right to left, a cracked walnut and cherries on a grape leaf, an open pomegranate and stone fruit with several leaves overhanging the stone ledge in each. The only significant alteration is at lower left, where the artist has substituted the figs and plums found in the Schwerin painting with a bunch of blue grapes. The corner of the room is articulated in the background of both fruit pieces.

A series of intriguing and oft-cited letters from van Huysum to Duke Christian Ludwig von Mecklenburg, who acquired the pair in Schwerin directly from the artist, and the duke’s agent, A.N. van Haften, sheds light on van Huysum’s creative process in the period. Though dated 1742 and 1743, the Schwerin paintings must have absorbed van Huysum’s attention over the course of several years. Already on 27 February 1740, the artist referenced ‘the two above-mentioned pieces […] the one with fruit and the companion with flowers’ in a letter to his patron and the patron’s agent. In a subsequent letter dated 18 March 1741, van Huysum provided a further update, indicating ‘I am, at present, occupied in painting in the pieces on copper plates putti on a pot…’. Perhaps sensing his patron’s growing impatience, in a letter dated 17 July 1742 the painter informed the duke ‘that with all diligence I hope to finish painting the two pieces this year…; the flower piece is very far advanced, last year I could not get a yellow rose, else it would have been finished; the grapes and figs and pomegranate still have to be painted in the fruit piece’ (all quoted in Segal, 2007, pp. 270-271, under no. F39). The pictures were evidently delivered sometime before 19 December 1743, when van Huysum acknowledged receipt of the substantial sum of 2,000 guilders for the pair.

That van Huysum lavished up to four years’ attention on the duke’s paintings can only partly be explained by his technical virtuosity and painstaking method of painting for such an important patron. Equally important were the delays caused by seasonal access to specimens and van Huysum’s insistence that his blooms and fruit be depicted from life as a means of enhancing the illusionistic effects of his paintings. The ensuing delays may explain why a number of his paintings, the present fruit piece among them, are inscribed with two dates.

When this pair last appeared on the market more than twenty years ago, their earliest known provenance was said to be a putative 1799 sale referenced by both John Smith and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot. Prior to the 2003 sale, Burton Fredericksen confirmed this reference to be spurious and that their first recorded owner was probably Herman ten Kate, a wealthy Amsterdam cloth dealer who also owned such masterpieces as Johannes Vermeer’s Woman reading a letter in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig. 4). At ten Kate’s sale, the paintings were acquired by the artist Louis-Bernard Coclers, who entered them into a sale in Paris only a little over two months later.