Chrysanthemums, tulips, irises, peonies and other flowers in a lapis vase with gilt ormolu on a sculpted stone ledge

Picart was a Flemish artist who moved to Paris before 1635 where he set up in Saint Germain-des-Près as a painter and dealer. Although Flemish-trained, he tailored his style to the French market where taste increasingly tended towards the decorative and Italianate as the 17th century progressed. In this he was spectacularly successful, competing for commissions with Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. Picart soon enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu as well as King Louis XV: at least sixteen of his pictures are listed in royal inventories, including seven at Versailles. Félibien's seminal treatise Entretiens sur les vie et les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes of 1666, praises Picart as one of the greatest of all artists. He is even mentioned in the poetry of Tristan L'Hermite, himself a collector of floral still lifes, who worte in 1648
Within these immortal pages Unfamiliar flowers bloom Now we see just how Picart Has exploited all his art... Foliage appears in motion, Of scent and sound we gain the notion With their exquisite appeal Our five sense they can steal.' (A. Mérot, French Painting in the Seventeenth Century, English edition, transl. Caroline Benmish, 1995, p. 244, quoting Tristan L'Hermite, Les Vers hérriques, Paris 1648).

Picart's development of style is spectacularly apparent in the present picture, both in the bravura sense of colour and in the grandiosity of the lapis vase and its ormolu fittings. Stylistically, it corresponds closely with the only two known dated pictures by Picart, one of which in Karlsruhe is dated 1653 (see M. Faré, Le Grand Siècle de la nature morte en France, 1974, p. 96).