Flowers in a Vase by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder was created in 1614. The painting is in National Gallery, London. The size of the work is 26 x 21 cm and is made of oil on copper.
About the Work
If pictures had a smell, then Ambrosius Bosschaert’s paintings would fill the air with exotic scent. In this picture, his many different flowers are displayed against an almost black background to show their colours, shapes and textures to the fullest – pale roses, yellow and white narcissi, a single yellow chrysanthemum. The delicate petals of a purple cyclamen hide behind its broad leaf in the shadows at the base of the arrangement, where a fritillary hangs its head close to a red rosebud. A mauve anemone seems suspended in the dark space between two handsome tulips, one white, one yellow, streaked with flames of red, standing out stiff and proud against the profusion of petals below them.
But there’s one flower, on the left, that seems not to fit any particular description. The petals are splayed open as if exhausted. This too is a tulip, but faded, its time done. Bosschaert is showing us the lifespan of these flowers, but subtly, and placed together, still making them a thing of beauty. The white tulip is partly in bud; the yellow, fully open; the third, with its frilled petals, dying. The roses too show nature’s progression – the tight red bud in the shadows, the white rose, open and perfect, and just below, the full-blown, grey-pink, fragile bloom at the end of its brief life.
Bosschaert lived in Middelburg, where a large botanical garden had just opened. During the seventeenth century, 200 new species of plants were discovered, and many of them were grown there. Read more in National Gallery London
