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拍品專文
This spectacular floral arrangement is a dazzling example of the still lifes for which Jan van Huysum was dubbed the ‘Phoenix of Flower Painters’ by the contemporary painter and writer Jacob Campo Weyerman (De Levens-Beschryvingen der Nederlandsche Konst-Schilders en Konst-Schilderessen, The Hague, 1729). Van Huysum was highly prized for his sophisticated compositions and technical virtuosity. Both are wonderfully in evidence here, with the meticulous rendering of varied blooms, insects, and finch’s nest all beautifully preserved. Moreover, this painting has a remarkable history: it belonged not only to two of the most important Dutch collectors of the eighteenth century, Gerret Braamcamp and Jan Jansz. Gildemeester, but also to Dutch royalty, King Willem II of the Netherlands, before entering the celebrated Rothschild collection and, latterly, that of John Enrico Fattorini.
The stunning profusion of flowers here is intended as a visual celebration of nature as well as a lavish display of wealth and culture. Over twenty specimens – including five different types of roses – make up the floral arrangement in this painting, in which van Huysum has been described as attaining ‘optimum clarity and harmony’ (Segal, op. cit., p. 247). The flowers are painted in microscopic detail and their tangible presence is heightened by the hyper-realistic water droplets, varied insects, and chip on the marbled ledge that occurs just above van Huysum’s signature, which itself appears sculpted into the stone. Though relatively compact, individual blooms overlap each other in the bouquet, and other flowers, sprigs, and butterflies extend to the edges, thereby enhancing the illusion of space created by the niche. The cut rose branch at the bottom is balanced on top of the nest, creating a sweeping rhythm that reflects the curve of the niche above. The tonal choreography in this still life is remarkable, with van Huysum adopting subtle colour transitions and harmonies; note, for example, the subtlety of the pale pink peony set behind the white rose teeming with ants. Van Huysum’s light sources are daringly complex, often illuminating his still lifes at unexpected angles to enhance the illusion of depth. Here, the bouquet is lit from the left, not only across the flowers but also between them, with the result that the blooms at centre appear lighter behind and the right side of the niche interior brighter.
Close examination of the painting reveals that van Huysum built up the floral arrangement from back to front. This is visible in areas where there is greater transparency in the foreground flowers; for example, the narcissi painted over the leaf of the opium poppy (upper centre) or the orange-red anemone overlapping the pale blue one alongside (lower centre). The niche was evidently painted before the still-life elements since the vertical edges are visible through the orange nasturtium lower left and the butterfly wings centre right. A finch’s nest with five pale blue eggs teeters impossibly on the edge of the marble ledge. Its exaggerated tilt allows the viewer to appreciate its delicate structure, minutely observed and rendered with fastidious detail: van Huysum’s brush masterfully distinguishes between the textures of soft velvety moss, light fluffy feathers, interwoven twigs, unruly grass stalks and the smooth opaque shells of the eggs. The nest was probably a studio prop, as it reappears in a number of paintings by van Huysum, such as Flowers in a Terracotta Vase (1736-7; National Gallery, London; fig. 1). The two putti on the burnt-orange terracotta vase are also identical, suggesting that van Huysum either owned a relief with this motif or was working from drawings.
By 1734, when this picture was painted, van Huysum was well established as the foremost flower painter of his day. His exact working methods remain largely unknown, for van Huysum was famously secretive and refused to let anyone into his studio for fear they might learn his technique. He had no pupils, except Margaretha Havermann (1720–1795), who was forced to leave Amsterdam and return to Paris. Van Huysum is known to have used live flowers as models, as evidenced in a famous letter of 1742 to his patron, Duke Christian Ludwig von Mecklenburg, to whom the artist had to explain the significant delay to a painting he had commissioned: ‘last year I could not get a yellow rose, else it would have been finished’ (F. Schlie, 'Sieben Briefe und eine Quittung von Jan van Huijsum', Oud-Holland, XVIII, no. 3, 1900, p. 141). Van Huysum is said to have travelled every year to horticultural centres such as Haarlem, where he was provided with specimens and made sketches of rare and unusual flowers. Whilst he may have based individual blooms on real models, as suggested by the numerous single-flower watercolour studies that survive (many of which are in the British Museum, London), van Huysum seems to have developed his floral arrangements through compositional sketches.
Two sheets are particularly relevant to this painting. The first, in the British Museum (fig. 2), may be a preliminary study since it shows a similar terracotta vase and a broadly analogous construction to the bouquet, and includes a bird’s nest, a cut rose branch lower centre, and orange blossom in the lower right corner. It also appears to set the arrangement before a niche: charcoal lines indicating spandrels are faintly visible in the upper corners of the drawing. The other sheet is a watercolour dated 1735 (fig. 3), the year after this painting, and is therefore perhaps intended as a loose record of it. Many of the individual blooms are in identical positions, including the two yellow roses at centre, the bright blue iris nearby, the bud of the opium poppy at top, the white rose left of centre and orange-red anemone below, as well as the curved branch with pink roses and a bud in the immediate foreground.
Given this picture’s acclaim since the mid-eighteenth century, it is no wonder that a number of copies after it are known. A close variant in Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, which has long been taken to be an original or unfinished work on account of its rough execution, is probably a contemporary copy. In the 2006-7 exhibition, Sam Segal speculated that it may be by Jacob Xavery (1736–1771), an artist who attempted to undercut van Huysum by offering his paintings more cheaply to clients, including Caroline Louise, Margravine von Baden (1723–1783), who had been ‘so enraptured by the original’. After seeing van Huysum’s painting on her visit to Braamcamp’s collection in 1763, Caroline Louise made a failed attempt at purchasing it through her Paris agent, the banker M. Eberts. He reported back on the unsuccessful outcome of his negotiations: 'Cela ma valu des compliments mais non le beau Van Huysum à la branche d'orange que je marchande depuis 3 ans'. ('It earned me compliments, but not the beautiful Van Huysum with the orange branch that I have been haggling over for three years'; Bille, op. cit.). Eberts’s description leaves no doubt as to its association with the present work, given the prominence of the sprig of orange blossom lower right, and he notes – with a tinge of regret – the pre-eminence of this work over others: 'c’est le plus brillant que je connoisse' ('It is the most brilliant I know').
A STORIED PROVENANCE
On account of the superlative quality of this painting, it is in no way surprising that it successively passed through the hands of some of the greatest collectors of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Its earliest known owner was in all likelihood Johan Diedrik Pompe van Meerdervoort (1697–1749), burgomaster of Dordrecht, whose collection of paintings was sold alongside that of Jan van Huysum in Amsterdam on 14 October 1749. Though it has traditionally been suggested this still life was among the contents of van Huysum’s estate, close analysis of the sale’s contents suggests it instead belonged to Pompe van Meerdervoort.
While the sale catalogue offers no indication of which lots belonged to whom and there was a tendency to place the most valuable paintings at the beginning of a sale, Gerard Hoet’s transcription of the sale (op. cit.) may provide a critical clue about ownership: Hoet notes 'II. Deel' ('Second Part') after lot 84, a detail that is otherwise missing in the 1749 sale catalogue. The contents of the second part include 13 paintings in 12 lots by Jan van Huysum as well as a number of further works by Justus van Huysum. Of these, only one is a still life, a flower pot which sold for a comparatively modest 101 guilders, with the remaining being landscapes – including one (lot 122) explicitly described as ‘unfinished’ – and what appear to be sketches of birds (lots 96 and 97) that sold for 8 and 17 guilders each. By contrast, the first section includes 11 pictures in 10 lots, including three still lifes that achieved between 655 and 1,245 guilders, by far the highest prices of the sale. Similarly, of the landscapes, only two (lots 51 and 63) achieved prices that were lower than the most expensive landscape (lot 94) in the second part of the sale. In her recent entry on the floral still life in the Carter Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lot 8 in the 1749 sale), Amy Walsh arrived at a similar conclusion for the museum's painting, noting 'The success of the painting […] suggests that it had not remained in Van Huysum’s possession for twenty-five years as a model for other paintings but belonged to the collection of Pompe van Meerdervoort. The painting would have clearly suited the taste of the wealthy collector, who owned an elegant country house in Zwijndrecht across the River Maas from Dordrecht' (op. cit., p. 112).
The identity of the buyer at the 1749 sale is unknown (though he is marked as the letter ‘B’) and the painting was later documented in the collection of Gerret Braamcamp (1699–1771). Braamcamp (fig. 4) was the eldest son of the successful Amsterdam wine merchant Jan Braamcamp (c. 1671–1713). He joined the family business and, after the death of his parents, greatly expanded the family enterprises to include trade in timber. His financial success enabled him to assemble a renowned art collection that by the late 1760s included some 380 works, focused, like many of his peers, on Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. The collection included such masterpieces as Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), Gabriel Metsu's Old Woman with a Book by a Window (London, National Gallery) and Visit to the Nursery (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Philips Wouwerman's Knight Vanquishing Time, Death and Monstrous Demons (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) and Gerard ter Borch's Card Players (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The 1766 catalogue of his collection describes more than 150 paintings and the author, Jean-François de Bastide, is careful to point out that Braamcamp was making acquisitions apace at time of writing (op. cit.). The present still life was one of six works by van Huysum situated in 'La Salle', a room in Braamcamp’s townhouse at Herengracht 462, Amsterdam, in which significant Dutch pictures from the collection were evidently displayed (including works by Gerrit Dou, Adriaen van Ostade, Gabriel Metsu, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman, Simon Verelst, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Weenix). This reference to 'La Salle' has led Segal (op. cit.) to wrongly infer that the picture was with an art dealer of that name in 1766.
The posthumous sale of Braamcamp’s collection in 1771 proved something of a sensation, with 20,000 people viewing the contents and 2,000 copies of the catalogue sold. The sale included no less than seven further paintings by van Huysum – including two in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and one each in the National Gallery, London, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among the buyers at Braamcamp’s sale were agents for Empress Catherine II of Russia, who bought a dozen pictures, including Gerrit Dou’s The Nursery and Paulus Potter’s Large Drove of Oxen, the two most expensive lots in the sale. On 5 September, the newly acquired paintings were loaded on the Vrouw Maria, which was bound for Saint Petersburg but foundered off the coast of Finland during a storm on 3 October. While the crew survived, the ship sank and the paintings were lost forever.
Rather fortuitously, van Huysum’s extraordinary still life was not among those works acquired by the Russian Empress at Braamcamp’s sale, passing instead to Jan Jansz. Gildemeester (1744–1799), the son of an eponymous merchant who served as Consul-General in Lisbon until the mid-1750s, when he returned to Amsterdam to set up a trading company with his sons. In 1778, Jan Jansz. followed in his father’s footsteps when the Dutch Republic appointed him agent and Consul-General to Portugal based in Amsterdam. In 1792, he moved from the city’s Keizersgracht to the tony Herengracht. Adriaan de Lelie’s depiction of the interior of his townhouse (fig. 5) presents a record of the walls, densely hung from floor to ceiling. Gildemeester's taste followed the contemporary Dutch fashion: his collection included the best representatives of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art, of which perhaps the most celebrated today are Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier (London, Wallace Collection) and Vermeer's Astronomer (Paris, Musée du Louvre). It also included no fewer than ten paintings by van Huysum; including, for example, the Flowers in a Terracotta Vase in the National Gallery, London (also formerly in the Braamcamp collection). Further examples by the likes of Gerrit Dou (Private collection, on loan to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London), Pieter de Hooch (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum), Gerard ter Borch (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle), Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens (both Duke of Sutherland), and Meindert Hobbema (London, Wallace Collection) can be seen in the background of de Lelie’s interior.
The present flower piece subsequently passed through the hands of George Watson Taylor (1771–1841), whose collection of old master paintings and ancien régime furniture was only rivalled by those of King George IV and the 10th Duke of Hamilton. Watson Taylor was the son of a West Indian planter of relatively modest means but in 1810 married Anna Taylor, the daughter of a much wealthier planter who eventually inherited not only her father's but also her brother's vast fortunes. In a remarkably short time, Watson Taylor amassed a magnificent collection of paintings – advised by the first director of the National Gallery in London, William Seguier – which included such masterpieces as Parmigianino's Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, Adam Elsheimer's Tobias and the Archangel Raphael Returning with the Fish and William Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl (all now in the National Gallery, London). The collection was divided equally between his Cavendish Square townhouse and Erlestoke Park, his country seat. Watson Taylor’s fall from financial grace was, however, as rapid as his rise, and financial straits forced the disbursal of the collection in a series of sales held in 1823, 1825 and 1832.
When this painting was offered for sale in 1823 (lot 62), it was sold with 'A Group of Fruits' by van Huysum which the catalogue erroneously described as 'the companion picture' (lot 63). The two paintings had been together since the mid-eighteenth century when Braamcamp had 'paired' this flower still life with a fruit piece of analogous dimensions, also on panel, signed and dated 1731 (later in the Westminster collection; sold, Christie’s, London, 8 July 2005, lot 115). This false pairing persisted through the latter half of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, when both paintings were in the collections of Gildemeester and Watson Taylor. Hofstede de Groot also maintained that they were pendants (op. cit.). In the 2006-7 exhibition catalogue, Sam Segal further muddied the waters by stating that the present flower still life was owned by Sir Francis Baring (1740–1810) and his eldest son Sir Thomas Baring (1772–1848), from whom King George IV of England acquired the picture. This confusion presumably arose from a Vase of Flowers of similar dimensions (though described as being on canvas) being lent by Thomas Baring to the Royal Academy in 1872, by which point the present picture was almost certainly already in the Rothschild collection.
The buyer at the Watson Taylor sale in June 1823 has been wrongly identified as 'Down' and 'Peel' in the literature (Hofstede de Groot and Segal, respectively), but a close reading of the annotated sale catalogue in Christie’s Archives reveals that the buyer was, in fact, the art dealer John Smith (1781–1855). Smith had a good professional relationship with the Belgian dealer Lambert Jan Nieuwenhuys (1777–1872), whose name appears frequently in Smith’s early ledgers. It was almost certainly through Smith that Christianus Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1799–1883), Lambert’s son and also a prominent dealer active in both Brussels and London, was able to handle this flower still life, selling it just a few months later (in September 1823) to King Willem II of the Netherlands. Willem II’s appetite for works of the highest calibre was legendary. Having spent time in England, where he admired George IV’s collection at Carlton House, he set about assembling in little more than a decade a collection of over 350 old masters intended to rival those of Europe’s reigning dynasties at his Palais de la Nouvelle Cour in Brussels. The gallery was arranged in a sequence of colour-coded salons – the Salon Bleu, Salon Jaune, and Salon Gris – a decorative program devised to heighten the splendour of the pictures. Van Huysum’s still life was recorded in the Grey Salon, one of the principal state rooms, where it was displayed alongside works by Rubens, van Dyck and Rembrandt (Nieuwenhuys, op. cit.; Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit.). Nieuwenhuys, who served as an advisor to the king, was instrumental in shaping his voracious appetite and taste. In addition to the present still life, in 1823 alone Willem secured close to fifty other works, including early Netherlandish panels and Italian Renaissance masterpieces. Nieuwenhuys would memorialize the collection in two catalogues (1837; 1846). Following the Belgian Revolution of 1830, Willem transferred the collection to The Hague, continuing to augment it with acquisitions in Paris and London until his sudden death in 1849.
At some point after Willem’s legendary estate sale, the painting entered the collection of Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild. His estate of Gunnersbury Park contained innumerable celebrated works by other Dutch and Flemish masters. Among the other highlights of the collection were Pieter de Hooch’s Woman with a bucket in a courtyard (Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe) and Jan van der Heyden’s An architectural fantasy (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). On account of their similar sizes, Lionel Nathan appears to have made a pair of this painting with the fruit piece (lot 7), commissioning matching frames, and the two paintings remained together ever since.
The stunning profusion of flowers here is intended as a visual celebration of nature as well as a lavish display of wealth and culture. Over twenty specimens – including five different types of roses – make up the floral arrangement in this painting, in which van Huysum has been described as attaining ‘optimum clarity and harmony’ (Segal, op. cit., p. 247). The flowers are painted in microscopic detail and their tangible presence is heightened by the hyper-realistic water droplets, varied insects, and chip on the marbled ledge that occurs just above van Huysum’s signature, which itself appears sculpted into the stone. Though relatively compact, individual blooms overlap each other in the bouquet, and other flowers, sprigs, and butterflies extend to the edges, thereby enhancing the illusion of space created by the niche. The cut rose branch at the bottom is balanced on top of the nest, creating a sweeping rhythm that reflects the curve of the niche above. The tonal choreography in this still life is remarkable, with van Huysum adopting subtle colour transitions and harmonies; note, for example, the subtlety of the pale pink peony set behind the white rose teeming with ants. Van Huysum’s light sources are daringly complex, often illuminating his still lifes at unexpected angles to enhance the illusion of depth. Here, the bouquet is lit from the left, not only across the flowers but also between them, with the result that the blooms at centre appear lighter behind and the right side of the niche interior brighter.
Close examination of the painting reveals that van Huysum built up the floral arrangement from back to front. This is visible in areas where there is greater transparency in the foreground flowers; for example, the narcissi painted over the leaf of the opium poppy (upper centre) or the orange-red anemone overlapping the pale blue one alongside (lower centre). The niche was evidently painted before the still-life elements since the vertical edges are visible through the orange nasturtium lower left and the butterfly wings centre right. A finch’s nest with five pale blue eggs teeters impossibly on the edge of the marble ledge. Its exaggerated tilt allows the viewer to appreciate its delicate structure, minutely observed and rendered with fastidious detail: van Huysum’s brush masterfully distinguishes between the textures of soft velvety moss, light fluffy feathers, interwoven twigs, unruly grass stalks and the smooth opaque shells of the eggs. The nest was probably a studio prop, as it reappears in a number of paintings by van Huysum, such as Flowers in a Terracotta Vase (1736-7; National Gallery, London; fig. 1). The two putti on the burnt-orange terracotta vase are also identical, suggesting that van Huysum either owned a relief with this motif or was working from drawings.
By 1734, when this picture was painted, van Huysum was well established as the foremost flower painter of his day. His exact working methods remain largely unknown, for van Huysum was famously secretive and refused to let anyone into his studio for fear they might learn his technique. He had no pupils, except Margaretha Havermann (1720–1795), who was forced to leave Amsterdam and return to Paris. Van Huysum is known to have used live flowers as models, as evidenced in a famous letter of 1742 to his patron, Duke Christian Ludwig von Mecklenburg, to whom the artist had to explain the significant delay to a painting he had commissioned: ‘last year I could not get a yellow rose, else it would have been finished’ (F. Schlie, 'Sieben Briefe und eine Quittung von Jan van Huijsum', Oud-Holland, XVIII, no. 3, 1900, p. 141). Van Huysum is said to have travelled every year to horticultural centres such as Haarlem, where he was provided with specimens and made sketches of rare and unusual flowers. Whilst he may have based individual blooms on real models, as suggested by the numerous single-flower watercolour studies that survive (many of which are in the British Museum, London), van Huysum seems to have developed his floral arrangements through compositional sketches.
Two sheets are particularly relevant to this painting. The first, in the British Museum (fig. 2), may be a preliminary study since it shows a similar terracotta vase and a broadly analogous construction to the bouquet, and includes a bird’s nest, a cut rose branch lower centre, and orange blossom in the lower right corner. It also appears to set the arrangement before a niche: charcoal lines indicating spandrels are faintly visible in the upper corners of the drawing. The other sheet is a watercolour dated 1735 (fig. 3), the year after this painting, and is therefore perhaps intended as a loose record of it. Many of the individual blooms are in identical positions, including the two yellow roses at centre, the bright blue iris nearby, the bud of the opium poppy at top, the white rose left of centre and orange-red anemone below, as well as the curved branch with pink roses and a bud in the immediate foreground.
Given this picture’s acclaim since the mid-eighteenth century, it is no wonder that a number of copies after it are known. A close variant in Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, which has long been taken to be an original or unfinished work on account of its rough execution, is probably a contemporary copy. In the 2006-7 exhibition, Sam Segal speculated that it may be by Jacob Xavery (1736–1771), an artist who attempted to undercut van Huysum by offering his paintings more cheaply to clients, including Caroline Louise, Margravine von Baden (1723–1783), who had been ‘so enraptured by the original’. After seeing van Huysum’s painting on her visit to Braamcamp’s collection in 1763, Caroline Louise made a failed attempt at purchasing it through her Paris agent, the banker M. Eberts. He reported back on the unsuccessful outcome of his negotiations: 'Cela ma valu des compliments mais non le beau Van Huysum à la branche d'orange que je marchande depuis 3 ans'. ('It earned me compliments, but not the beautiful Van Huysum with the orange branch that I have been haggling over for three years'; Bille, op. cit.). Eberts’s description leaves no doubt as to its association with the present work, given the prominence of the sprig of orange blossom lower right, and he notes – with a tinge of regret – the pre-eminence of this work over others: 'c’est le plus brillant que je connoisse' ('It is the most brilliant I know').
A STORIED PROVENANCE
On account of the superlative quality of this painting, it is in no way surprising that it successively passed through the hands of some of the greatest collectors of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Its earliest known owner was in all likelihood Johan Diedrik Pompe van Meerdervoort (1697–1749), burgomaster of Dordrecht, whose collection of paintings was sold alongside that of Jan van Huysum in Amsterdam on 14 October 1749. Though it has traditionally been suggested this still life was among the contents of van Huysum’s estate, close analysis of the sale’s contents suggests it instead belonged to Pompe van Meerdervoort.
While the sale catalogue offers no indication of which lots belonged to whom and there was a tendency to place the most valuable paintings at the beginning of a sale, Gerard Hoet’s transcription of the sale (op. cit.) may provide a critical clue about ownership: Hoet notes 'II. Deel' ('Second Part') after lot 84, a detail that is otherwise missing in the 1749 sale catalogue. The contents of the second part include 13 paintings in 12 lots by Jan van Huysum as well as a number of further works by Justus van Huysum. Of these, only one is a still life, a flower pot which sold for a comparatively modest 101 guilders, with the remaining being landscapes – including one (lot 122) explicitly described as ‘unfinished’ – and what appear to be sketches of birds (lots 96 and 97) that sold for 8 and 17 guilders each. By contrast, the first section includes 11 pictures in 10 lots, including three still lifes that achieved between 655 and 1,245 guilders, by far the highest prices of the sale. Similarly, of the landscapes, only two (lots 51 and 63) achieved prices that were lower than the most expensive landscape (lot 94) in the second part of the sale. In her recent entry on the floral still life in the Carter Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lot 8 in the 1749 sale), Amy Walsh arrived at a similar conclusion for the museum's painting, noting 'The success of the painting […] suggests that it had not remained in Van Huysum’s possession for twenty-five years as a model for other paintings but belonged to the collection of Pompe van Meerdervoort. The painting would have clearly suited the taste of the wealthy collector, who owned an elegant country house in Zwijndrecht across the River Maas from Dordrecht' (op. cit., p. 112).
The identity of the buyer at the 1749 sale is unknown (though he is marked as the letter ‘B’) and the painting was later documented in the collection of Gerret Braamcamp (1699–1771). Braamcamp (fig. 4) was the eldest son of the successful Amsterdam wine merchant Jan Braamcamp (c. 1671–1713). He joined the family business and, after the death of his parents, greatly expanded the family enterprises to include trade in timber. His financial success enabled him to assemble a renowned art collection that by the late 1760s included some 380 works, focused, like many of his peers, on Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. The collection included such masterpieces as Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), Gabriel Metsu's Old Woman with a Book by a Window (London, National Gallery) and Visit to the Nursery (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Philips Wouwerman's Knight Vanquishing Time, Death and Monstrous Demons (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) and Gerard ter Borch's Card Players (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The 1766 catalogue of his collection describes more than 150 paintings and the author, Jean-François de Bastide, is careful to point out that Braamcamp was making acquisitions apace at time of writing (op. cit.). The present still life was one of six works by van Huysum situated in 'La Salle', a room in Braamcamp’s townhouse at Herengracht 462, Amsterdam, in which significant Dutch pictures from the collection were evidently displayed (including works by Gerrit Dou, Adriaen van Ostade, Gabriel Metsu, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman, Simon Verelst, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Weenix). This reference to 'La Salle' has led Segal (op. cit.) to wrongly infer that the picture was with an art dealer of that name in 1766.
The posthumous sale of Braamcamp’s collection in 1771 proved something of a sensation, with 20,000 people viewing the contents and 2,000 copies of the catalogue sold. The sale included no less than seven further paintings by van Huysum – including two in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and one each in the National Gallery, London, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among the buyers at Braamcamp’s sale were agents for Empress Catherine II of Russia, who bought a dozen pictures, including Gerrit Dou’s The Nursery and Paulus Potter’s Large Drove of Oxen, the two most expensive lots in the sale. On 5 September, the newly acquired paintings were loaded on the Vrouw Maria, which was bound for Saint Petersburg but foundered off the coast of Finland during a storm on 3 October. While the crew survived, the ship sank and the paintings were lost forever.
Rather fortuitously, van Huysum’s extraordinary still life was not among those works acquired by the Russian Empress at Braamcamp’s sale, passing instead to Jan Jansz. Gildemeester (1744–1799), the son of an eponymous merchant who served as Consul-General in Lisbon until the mid-1750s, when he returned to Amsterdam to set up a trading company with his sons. In 1778, Jan Jansz. followed in his father’s footsteps when the Dutch Republic appointed him agent and Consul-General to Portugal based in Amsterdam. In 1792, he moved from the city’s Keizersgracht to the tony Herengracht. Adriaan de Lelie’s depiction of the interior of his townhouse (fig. 5) presents a record of the walls, densely hung from floor to ceiling. Gildemeester's taste followed the contemporary Dutch fashion: his collection included the best representatives of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art, of which perhaps the most celebrated today are Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier (London, Wallace Collection) and Vermeer's Astronomer (Paris, Musée du Louvre). It also included no fewer than ten paintings by van Huysum; including, for example, the Flowers in a Terracotta Vase in the National Gallery, London (also formerly in the Braamcamp collection). Further examples by the likes of Gerrit Dou (Private collection, on loan to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London), Pieter de Hooch (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum), Gerard ter Borch (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle), Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens (both Duke of Sutherland), and Meindert Hobbema (London, Wallace Collection) can be seen in the background of de Lelie’s interior.
The present flower piece subsequently passed through the hands of George Watson Taylor (1771–1841), whose collection of old master paintings and ancien régime furniture was only rivalled by those of King George IV and the 10th Duke of Hamilton. Watson Taylor was the son of a West Indian planter of relatively modest means but in 1810 married Anna Taylor, the daughter of a much wealthier planter who eventually inherited not only her father's but also her brother's vast fortunes. In a remarkably short time, Watson Taylor amassed a magnificent collection of paintings – advised by the first director of the National Gallery in London, William Seguier – which included such masterpieces as Parmigianino's Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, Adam Elsheimer's Tobias and the Archangel Raphael Returning with the Fish and William Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl (all now in the National Gallery, London). The collection was divided equally between his Cavendish Square townhouse and Erlestoke Park, his country seat. Watson Taylor’s fall from financial grace was, however, as rapid as his rise, and financial straits forced the disbursal of the collection in a series of sales held in 1823, 1825 and 1832.
When this painting was offered for sale in 1823 (lot 62), it was sold with 'A Group of Fruits' by van Huysum which the catalogue erroneously described as 'the companion picture' (lot 63). The two paintings had been together since the mid-eighteenth century when Braamcamp had 'paired' this flower still life with a fruit piece of analogous dimensions, also on panel, signed and dated 1731 (later in the Westminster collection; sold, Christie’s, London, 8 July 2005, lot 115). This false pairing persisted through the latter half of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, when both paintings were in the collections of Gildemeester and Watson Taylor. Hofstede de Groot also maintained that they were pendants (op. cit.). In the 2006-7 exhibition catalogue, Sam Segal further muddied the waters by stating that the present flower still life was owned by Sir Francis Baring (1740–1810) and his eldest son Sir Thomas Baring (1772–1848), from whom King George IV of England acquired the picture. This confusion presumably arose from a Vase of Flowers of similar dimensions (though described as being on canvas) being lent by Thomas Baring to the Royal Academy in 1872, by which point the present picture was almost certainly already in the Rothschild collection.
The buyer at the Watson Taylor sale in June 1823 has been wrongly identified as 'Down' and 'Peel' in the literature (Hofstede de Groot and Segal, respectively), but a close reading of the annotated sale catalogue in Christie’s Archives reveals that the buyer was, in fact, the art dealer John Smith (1781–1855). Smith had a good professional relationship with the Belgian dealer Lambert Jan Nieuwenhuys (1777–1872), whose name appears frequently in Smith’s early ledgers. It was almost certainly through Smith that Christianus Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1799–1883), Lambert’s son and also a prominent dealer active in both Brussels and London, was able to handle this flower still life, selling it just a few months later (in September 1823) to King Willem II of the Netherlands. Willem II’s appetite for works of the highest calibre was legendary. Having spent time in England, where he admired George IV’s collection at Carlton House, he set about assembling in little more than a decade a collection of over 350 old masters intended to rival those of Europe’s reigning dynasties at his Palais de la Nouvelle Cour in Brussels. The gallery was arranged in a sequence of colour-coded salons – the Salon Bleu, Salon Jaune, and Salon Gris – a decorative program devised to heighten the splendour of the pictures. Van Huysum’s still life was recorded in the Grey Salon, one of the principal state rooms, where it was displayed alongside works by Rubens, van Dyck and Rembrandt (Nieuwenhuys, op. cit.; Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit.). Nieuwenhuys, who served as an advisor to the king, was instrumental in shaping his voracious appetite and taste. In addition to the present still life, in 1823 alone Willem secured close to fifty other works, including early Netherlandish panels and Italian Renaissance masterpieces. Nieuwenhuys would memorialize the collection in two catalogues (1837; 1846). Following the Belgian Revolution of 1830, Willem transferred the collection to The Hague, continuing to augment it with acquisitions in Paris and London until his sudden death in 1849.
At some point after Willem’s legendary estate sale, the painting entered the collection of Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild. His estate of Gunnersbury Park contained innumerable celebrated works by other Dutch and Flemish masters. Among the other highlights of the collection were Pieter de Hooch’s Woman with a bucket in a courtyard (Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe) and Jan van der Heyden’s An architectural fantasy (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). On account of their similar sizes, Lionel Nathan appears to have made a pair of this painting with the fruit piece (lot 7), commissioning matching frames, and the two paintings remained together ever since.