Dumbarton Oaks - Basket of Flowers

Basket of Flowers

Johannes Bosschaert (ca. 1610–ca. 1630)

Flemish, Baroque
ca. 1620
33.02 cm x 51.44 cm (13 in. x 20 1/4 in.)
oil on panel
HC.P.1959.10.(O)

Not on view

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Framed, on view

Description

Johannes Bosschaert was born on March 28, 1604 in Middelburg, Zeeland, The Netherlands. (1) His recently discovered birth certificate (2) established that he was older than was previously thought (his birth was usually given as ca. 1610) and that he was the first-born son of the flower still-life painter and art dealer Ambrosius Bosschaert III (1573-1621), usually known as Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, and his wife, Maria van der Ast (born ca. 1575), who married in 1604. Middelburg at that time was home to numerous amateur botanists who grew in their gardens special breeds of flowers, some obtained with the help of Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), director of the Botanical Garden at Leyden University. (3) Johannes and his artistic brothers, Ambrosius IV (christened 1609-1645) and Abraham (1612-1643) moved with their parents to Bergen op Zoom in 1615 and by 1616 to Utrecht because of their father’s work. With Ambrosius Bosschaert’s presence in Utrecht, the city became the main center in the Netherlands for flower and fruit still life painting, and the flower painters Balthasar van der Ast (1594-1657) (Ambrosius’s brother-in-law) and Roelandt Savery (1576-1639) also established themselves in Utrecht. These artists were leaders in popularizing the independent genres of flower and fruit still life paintings and influencing a generation of flower painters in the Netherlands. Before the end of 1619, the Bosschaert family moved again to Breda. After his father’s death in 1621, Johannes probably was apprenticed to his uncle, Balthasar van der Ast, in Utrecht. In 1623, Johannes became a member of the painters’ Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem, and his presence was recorded there again in 1625, although by 1628 he had moved to Dordrecht and joined that city’s Guild of St. Luke. He died in Dordrecht, probably in 1628, the date of his last known dated work.

Johannes Bosschaert’s body of works consists of approximately twenty undisputed paintings, nine of which are dated between 1624 and 1628. His earlier paintings reflect both his father’s and Van der Ast’s styles and compositional formulas, especially the latter’s preference for horizontal-format compositions and the use of overblown variegated tulips. However, Johannes Bosschaert’s floral bouquet compositions vary greatly, and he seems, over time, to have experimented with and rethought the representational formulas that he was taught. Unlike his father and uncle, he rarely repeated individual flowers, shells, or pieces of fruit verbatim, although he may well have painted from a series of sketches depicting the same flower from various vantage points. Johannes Bosschaert signed many of his paintings with the monogram IB, although he also used the signature I Bosschaert, as on the Dumbarton Oaks painting.

In this painting, various types of flowers—including roses, tulips, irises, and fritillaries, not all of which could have bloomed at the same time—are arranged in an open-work basket with a handle. Each is depicted in meticulous detail. A bunch of translucent grapes, three seashells, and a variegated tulip lie in front of the basket on a stone ledge. Flies with transparent wings crawl on the grapes and on the white rose in the bouquet, and a worm inches down the stem of the pink rose at the back. The majority of objects in the painting are rendered with the same clarity of detail, and each is fully revealed in its color and form in an even light. No flower is subordinated to another in the composition, which nevertheless remains greatly realistic.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, the Netherlands and Germany saw a rise in the interest in the botany of flowers that led to an increase in floral still life paintings. Flowers as well as paintings of flowers became a passion—sometimes referred to as a mania—in The Netherlands that was fueled by the availability of brightly colored exotic species that were imported from the Balkans, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Both amateur botanists and gardeners eagerly sought to acquire these unusual flowers, which they often purchased at high prices and cultivated in their gardens. The tulip was particularly prized as were other bulbous plants, such as the iris, the narcissus, the lily, and the fritillaria. Artists, who would not have been able to afford such plants, painted or, more typically, sketched them from the collections of patrons and botanists and then recombined them in their still life paintings. (4)

Johannes Bosschaert’s Basket of Flowers, with its horizontal format, uninterrupted ledge, open-work basket of symmetrically arranged flowers, and darkened background, employs a compositional format frequently used by the artist for both flower and fruit still life paintings. (5) This compositional type also had been frequently employed by Balthasar van der Ast, (6) Johannes’s uncle, and occasionally by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Johannes’s father. Ambrosius Bosschaert used this composition as early as 1614, before his arrival in Utrecht. (7) Before then, however, he typically preferred tight compositional schemes built around a vertical rather than a horizontal axis, (8) much in the manner of the flower still lifes of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). In his earlier paintings, Ambrosius represented the vase and flowers very close to the picture plane with a limited sense of depth. However, by about 1608, he began to place the flowers further back in the composition, thereby surrounding them with an illusory space. He also began to render life-sized flowers with near-scientific precision and, by reducing the number of blooms, imbued the composition with a greater clarity and air of tranquility. By 1614, he employed this less crowded, more spatially coherent pictorial type using a horizontal format, substituting a horizontal wicker basket for the vertical glass vase of his previous panels. It was this compositional formula that Johannes imitated.

The inclusion of flowers, shells, and insects together in this and similar still life paintings very likely was due to the interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to catalogue and assemble collections of the natural phenomena of the world. These collections were often housed in rooms or “cabinets of curiosities,” (9) and collectors would proudly display or show guests their specimens. Especially seashells, insects, and exotic fruits and flowers were collected, traded, and enumerated in encyclopedias. (10) Paintings, drawings, and illuminated manuscripts augmented these naturalist collections. Knowledgeable patrons would have demanded that the individual species of the flowers, the seashells, and the insects in flower still life paintings be scientifically accurate and identifiable.

It is also possible that the flowers, seashells, and insects in this and other Dutch flower still life paintings were meant to have “disguised” symbolic meanings. Certainly flowers, such as the rose, lily, and violet, had traditionally come to symbolize Christian values, such as purity, or obliquely to refer to Biblical events, such as the Passion and the Resurrection. However, in the seventeenth century, flowers and fruit were more commonly used to suggest life’s brevity as well as the transience of its beauty. For this reason, flowers and fruit were occasionally included in vanitas paintings where they and other objects served to symbolize the transient nature of earthly life and the meaninglessness of human vanity. (11) This “disguised symbolism” also may have been employed in purely flower still life paintings, such as the Dumbarton Oaks painting. The short-lived flowers, viewed in various stages of their bloom cycle, and the empty shells of marine animals possibly were intended to remind the viewer of the cycle of life, death, and—with the shells—resurrection. The translucent grapes might have symbolized Christ, the agent of human salvation, (12) and the insects might have symbolized agents of decay and thus agents of evil. However, no contemporary seventeenth-century documentary evidence clearly indicates that flower still life paintings were intended to be understood in this way. (13) Johannes Bosschaert might have included translucent grapes in this painting to allude to the tradition of artistic mimesis begun, according to tradition, when the Greek painter Zeuxis painted this very fruit and successfully deceived birds into thinking the grapes were real. (14) This still life painting, therefore, may be a multi-layered synthesis of an allegorical statement on the brevity of life and the inevitability of death and decay, Christian religious symbols and Biblical references, and a dazzlingly realistic, even scientific depiction of coveted and collected objects.

(1) For the biography of Johannes Bosschaert, see Laurens Johannes Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty: Painters of Flowers and Fruit (Leigh-on-Sea, 1960), and Jane Turner, ed., From Rembrandt to Vermeer, 17th century Dutch Artists (New York, 2000), 46.

(2) Rudi Bosschaerts, “Bosschaerts –Persyn Genealogical Research” (Brussels, 2003) >http://www.bosschaerts.be/genealogy/histories/07en_schilders-5_bosschaert-johannes.php< (accessed 6/30/2011).

(3) Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, 15-17. Other collectors assembled natural and artificial objects, such as bones, shells, and artworks, as microcosmic examples of the known world.

(4) See Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., From Botany to Bouquets (Washington, D.C., 1999).

(5) For example, Panier de Fleurs, Musée du Louvre, Paris, M.N.R. 583 (oil on copper, 34 x 45 cm). This painting has also been attributed to Balthasar van der Ast.

(6) For example, A Basket of Flowers with Shells on a Ledge, The Fitzwiliam Museum, Cambridge, PD.15-1975 (signed B.van der.ast., oil on panel, 20 x 28.4 cm).

(7) For example, Flower Still Life, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 83.PC.386 (initialed and dated 1614, oil on copper, 28.6 x 38.1 cm).

(8) Fred G. Meijer in The Mauritshuis in Bloom, Bouquets from the Golden Age, Peter van der Ploeg, ed. (The Hague, 1992), 62, cat. no. 6.

(9) See Pierre Martin and Dominique Moncond’Huy, Curiosité et Cabinets de Curiosités (Neuilly, 2004); Patricia Falguières, Les Chambres des Merveilles (Paris, 2003); and Olivier Impey and Arthur MacGregor, The Origins of Museums, The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (New York, 2001).

(10) Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Still Life, A History (New York, 1998), 54-56.

(11) Norbert Schneider, Still Life (Cologne, 2005), 77.

(12) For example, the Gospel of John 15:1 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” (American Standard Bible). Eddy de Jongh studied the significance of grapes as religious symbols in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings: “Grape Symbolism in Paintings of the 16th and 17th Centuries,” in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art vol. 7, no. 4 (1974), 166-191.

(13) For a detailed investigation of possible symbolism in Dutch seventeenth-century still lifes, see Harry Berger, Jr., Caterpillage, Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting (New York, 2011), and Christian Klemm, “Weltdeutung—Allegorien und Symbole in Stillebem,” in Stilleben in Europa, Gerhard Langemeyer and Hans-Albert Peters, eds. (Munster, 1979), 140-170. Svetlana Alpers has questioned the symbolic and allegorical interpretations of Dutch still life paintings, suggesting that still lifes as well as landscape paintings should be understood as examples of early naturalism, an attempt to render the objects of the world “as they were presented to the eye.” Alpers, Svetlana The Art of Describing, Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983).

(14) The eighteenth-century Valencian art historian, Marcos Antonio Orellana, in discussing the Spanish still life painter Tómas Hiepes (1600-1674), wrote: “I myself have by his hand a basketful of grapes, which I esteem. The limpid and translucent grapes with the vine leaves could deceive the birds, like those other celebrated grapes by Zeuxis.” Biografía Pictórica Valenciana o Vida de los Pintores, Arquitectos, Escultores y Grabadores Valencianos, Xavier de Salas, ed. (Valencia, 1967), 221-222.

J. Carder

Acquisition History

Purchased through Heywood Hill, Ltd., London, from Christies, London [no. 80], by Mildred Barnes Bliss, Washington, DC for the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, November 27, 1959;

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, House Collection, Washington, D.C.

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