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拍品专文
This exquisite work was executed when Daniel Seghers was at the height of his powers. Painted with extraordinary delicacy and clarity, these garlands demonstrate the painter’s consummate skill at rendering flowers. Seghers began his artistic training in Utrecht but, in 1609 or 1610, returned to his native Antwerp, where he worked with Jan Brueghel the Elder. Raised a Protestant, Seghers converted to Catholicism in the early 1610s, perhaps under Brueghel’s influence, and was admitted into the Jesuit Order in 1614 (taking his final vows eleven years later). Many of the painter’s signed works, including the present picture, are inscribed ‘Societatis Jesu’ (usually abbreviated), denoting the painter’s allegiance to the Jesuit Order, which received payment for his works.
Seghers pioneered the use of decorative floral garlands to embellish a central image, typically of a religious subject. Usually, such devotional images appear as carved stone cartouches, contributed by another painter. Such collaborations were common practice in Antwerp during the mid-seventeenth century. Seghers is known to have collaborated with many of the leading figure painters of his day, including Sir Peter Rubens, Hendrick van Balen and Erasmus Quellinus II, with whom he produced around thirty paintings. That Quellinus likely contributed the Virgin and Child in this painting is borne out by a notably similar Virgin and Child attributed to Quellinus in a painting dated 1646 sold Sotheby’s, New York, 11 June 1981, lot 70. The use of the Marian imagery here is significant. Not only do each of the flowers – save the tulips – carry Marian associations, but it was common practice in Flanders for devotional images of the Virgin and Child to be set into niches and adorned with floral decorations. This practice would not have been lost on contemporary viewers and would have heightened the spiritual significance of the artist’s paintings (see S. Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Still Life, Vision, and the Devotional Image, Farnham, 2012, pp. 112-116).
Seghers pioneered the use of decorative floral garlands to embellish a central image, typically of a religious subject. Usually, such devotional images appear as carved stone cartouches, contributed by another painter. Such collaborations were common practice in Antwerp during the mid-seventeenth century. Seghers is known to have collaborated with many of the leading figure painters of his day, including Sir Peter Rubens, Hendrick van Balen and Erasmus Quellinus II, with whom he produced around thirty paintings. That Quellinus likely contributed the Virgin and Child in this painting is borne out by a notably similar Virgin and Child attributed to Quellinus in a painting dated 1646 sold Sotheby’s, New York, 11 June 1981, lot 70. The use of the Marian imagery here is significant. Not only do each of the flowers – save the tulips – carry Marian associations, but it was common practice in Flanders for devotional images of the Virgin and Child to be set into niches and adorned with floral decorations. This practice would not have been lost on contemporary viewers and would have heightened the spiritual significance of the artist’s paintings (see S. Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Still Life, Vision, and the Devotional Image, Farnham, 2012, pp. 112-116).