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Artwork · 1603 · Flower painting

Bouquet

Jan Bruegel the Elder
1603 · Oil on Panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
★ 6.1 editorial score

Dozens of blooms crowd from a low vase - tulips, roses, irises, lilies, fritillaries - massed into a dense, impossible bouquet, since these flowers never bloom in the same season. Jan Bruegel the Elder assembled it from individual studies made across the year, building one of the first great independent flower paintings. The display dazzles, but a few petals already droop and an insect creeps among the leaves, the standard reminder that such beauty is fleeting. His meticulous, enamel-smooth flowers set the pattern for a whole genre of Netherlandish still life.

Movement
Baroque
Subject
Flowers

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Quote · 1893

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Arthur Conan Doyle