Roses, tulips, an iris and other flowers in a glass vase on a stone plinth with butterflies and other insects

In his Het Gulden Cabinet vande Edel Vry Schilder-Const (The Golden Cabinet of the Noble Liberal Art of Painting) of 1662, Cornelis de Bie described Jan van Kessel I as a ‘painter very renowned in flowers’. Van Kessel initially trained in the workshop of the Antwerp history painter Simon de Vos before completing his studies under his maternal uncle, Jan Brueghel II. This painting is a striking display of the degree to which he excelled at producing small-scale paintings on copper or panel. The hard surfaces of these supports enabled him to render a seemingly limitless variety of flowers, fruit, birds, insects and other animals with great precision.
Dating to the first half of the 1650s, the unpretentious elegance of this simple bouquet set within a glass vase calls to mind paintings by van Kessel’s friend and contemporary, Daniel Seghers, with whom van Kessel’s paintings have been confused. Like Seghers, van Kessel employed a refined sense of color in which he delineated the form of each petal with delicate half-tones as a means of creating a tactile, almost sculptural appeal. His use of an architectural plinth to present the bouquet is foreign to Seghers’ production of pure floral still lifes but is known in paintings by artists working in the tradition of Ambrosius Bosschaert I, including Ambrosius Bosschaert II and Jan Baptist van Fornenburgh, which may have provided a secondary source of inspiration for this work.