Two flower paintings by ‘the greatest of all’ Dutch still-life artists: Jan van Huysum

When the Swedish art historian Ingvar Bergström turned to the subject of flower painting in his magnum opus, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, first published in English in 1956, there was one name he ranked above all others: Jan van Huysum. ‘The greatest of all,’ he called him.

Bergström wasn’t the first to put the artist on this pedestal. During Van Huysum’s lifetime, thanks to his exuberant arrangements and technical virtuosity, his pictures were sought after by the Elector of Saxony, the prime minister of Britain, the dukes of Orleans and Mecklenburg and the king of Prussia.

The wealthiest collectors paid as much as 1,000 guilders for his work — five times the price of a painting by Rembrandt. Shortly after his death in 1749, at the age of 66, one even changed hands for quadruple that — an unprecedented sum.

On 30 June 2026, as part of Classic Week, Christie’s is offering two of his most important flower paintings: Fruit and flowers in a wicker basket and Flowers in a terracotta vase. They were paired in the latter half of the 19th century by Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, who commissioned matching giltwood frames that they still retain. They have hung as pendants ever since and, combined, they depict more than 40 specimens of flora and fauna.

Van Huysum was born in Amsterdam in 1682, when the 17th-century upsurge in Dutch art was reaching its peak. He was the third generation of a family of artists, yet his own work is more indebted to Jan Davidsz. de Heem, a still-life painter considered the father of pronkstilleven — or ‘show-off still lifes’ — who died in 1684.

Like de Heem, Van Huysum had sharp powers of observation and mastered the accurate rendering of botanical specimens. His fruits are painted with waxy blooms and juicy flesh. Flowers are rendered in subtle, variegated hues, built up with thin glazes of oils. Minute water droplets absorb and reflect the sunlight with a glistening sheen, and a handful of tiny ants crawling across the scene reward closer observation.

Van Huysum was more radical than de Heem, however, in the way he treated light and space. Over time, the palette of his backgrounds softened, and they started to include trees and Italianate landscapes. His sources of light were daringly complex, shining through — and even around the back of — his elaborate displays, which used sweeping rhythms to draw the eye in circular movements.

The overall effect was intended to embody the refinement of Dutch society while simultaneously dazzling the beholder. Van Huysum’s paintings celebrate nature and delight the scientifically curious. And their coded messages of abundance, transience and decay are in keeping with the tradition of vanitas painting.

Fruit and flowers in a wicker basket was probably made during the 1720s. Painted on a wooden panel, the tightly packed composition overflows with plump grapes, juicy plums and a split-open melon, all painted with meticulous accuracy. Meandering vines and blades of grass animate the fringes of the picture with sinuous diagonals, directing attention to a background containing a terracotta vase decorated with putti in relief.

Much of the verisimilitude in Van Huysum’s work derives from the fact that he insisted on painting from life. This led to frequent delays — sometimes for several years — as he waited for the right specimens to be in season. The British Museum has a collection of his single-flower watercolour studies, possibly made on trips to horticultural centres such as Haarlem. In recognition of his unparalleled role in the revival of realism in Dutch painting, his contemporary Jacob Campo Weyerman dubbed him ‘the Phoenix of Flower Painters’. So guarded was Van Huysum about the secrets of his virtuoso techniques, he denied artists, patrons, students and even his own family access to his studio.

Fruit and flowers in a wicker basket is first recorded in the collection of the Paris-based dealer Alexis Delahante, who supplied it to Charles Ferdinand de Bourbon, duc de Berry. Following the duke’s assassination in 1820, it passed to his widow, Princess Maria Carolina. In 1834, the picture was one of 188 from her collection that went on display at Christie’s in London.

By 1838, it was in London again, in the collection of Charles Heusch, whose son Frederick sold everything to Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild in 1855. The painting took its place alongside celebrated works by other Dutch and Flemish masters, embodying the family’s role as custodians of European cultural patrimony.

Because of their near-identical size, it appears that Rothschild paired it with another work by Van Huysum, Flowers in a terracotta vase.

Flowers in a terracotta vase shows a tightly packed bouquet of 20 specimens in bloom, including five varieties of rose. Minutely described flies, ants and butterflies heighten the work’s sense of realism, which is further enhanced by small chips on the signed and dated marble ledge. A scrupulously observed finch’s nest containing velvety moss, brittle twigs and five pale-blue eggs teeters impossibly on the marble’s edge — a trompe l’oeil leap from canvas to reality.

A source to the left cascades light not just across the arrangement, but between its blooms, so that the flowers in the centre shine more brightly than those in the foreground — a bravura example of what the artist described as the attainment of ‘optimum clarity and harmony’.

The work is first recorded in the collection of Johan Diederik Pompe van Meerdervoort, a wealthy collector and mayor of Dordrecht. He died four months after van Huysum, and property from both their collections was offered in the same auction in Amsterdam.

From there, it passed into the collection of a local wine merchant named Gerret Braamcamp, who also owned Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee — famously stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Braamcamp had seven other works by Van Huysum, some of which are now in London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery and National Gallery and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This picture was later acquired by Jan Jansz. Gildemeester, consul-general to Portugal, who also owned Vermeer’s The Astronomer, now in the Louvre in Paris, and Frans Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier, now in the Wallace Collection in London.

After Flowers in a terracotta vase had passed through several more owners — including King Willem II of the Netherlands — it was acquired in 1942, together with Fruit and flowers in a wicker basket, from Edmund Leopold de Rothschild by John Enrico Fattorini. Fattorini’s daughter Mary lent the two paintings to the Royal Academy in London between 1952 and 1953, and the City Art Gallery in York for 14 years from 1989. They were offered at auction in 2003, with Fruit and flowers in a wicker basket achieving a record price for the artist that still stands today.

Since then, they have only been shown in public once, as part of the exhibition The Temptations of Flora: Jan van Huysum, 1682-1749, shown at the Museum Prinsenhof Delft and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, between 2006 and 2007.

Jan van Huysum’s Fruit and flowers in a wicker basket and Flowers in a terracotta vase will travel to Christie’s in Hong Kong (22-27 May 2026) before the pre-sale exhibition in London (26-30 June)

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