Description
Jan van Huysum (1) (also spelled Huijsum) was born into an artistic family on April 15, 1682, in Amsterdam, where he lived his entire life. He was the son of Justus van Huysum (1659-1716), a flower still life painter and art dealer who ran a commercial workshop in which Jan and his three brothers were no doubt trained and eventually employed. He married in 1704, a fact that suggests he was then able to support a family from his work. Jan van Huysum’s reputation as an artist grew markedly following his father’s death in 1716. Although he also painted pastoral landscapes, it was especially his flower and fruit still life paintings that were greatly in demand and sold for high prices, and his patrons included Prince William of Hesse, the Duc d'Orléans of France, the kings of Poland and Prussia, the elector of Saxony, and Sir Robert Walpole, later Earl of Orford. Van Huysum was reportedly very secretive about his painting technique, especially his application of numerous layers of thin oil glazes to achieve depth and richness of color in his flowers, and allowed no one to witness his working process. He took only one student, Margaretha Haverman (1720-1795), with whom he parted company, reportedly, over his jealousy of her work. Jan van Huysum died in Amsterdam on February 8, 1749.
Jan van Huysum’s flower still lifes were made with a dazzling realism, where textural differentiation was given to individual blooms, leaves, and fruit as well as to insects and drops of water or dew. He seems to have worked from actual flowers and objects, which sometimes required his delaying the completion of a painting until a particular flower came into bloom. This may account for the occasional occurrence of two dates on a painting. However, he also produced a large number of drawings of both floral arrangements, no doubt studies for flower still life paintings, as well as detailed depictions of individual flowers. (2) Jan van Huysum organized the flowers of his bouquets into sweeping curved patterns that are made all the more dramatic by the strong highlighting and shadowing of the composition and the chiaroscuro modeling of the individual flowers. Although he was trained by his father, Jan van Huysum’s paintings are closer in composition to that of the artists Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606-1683/1684) and Willem van Aelst (1626-1683).
The great interest in botany that arose toward the end of the 1500s in The Netherlands and Germany (see HC.P.1959.10.[O]) directly brought about the demand for floral still lifes in Holland in the 1600s. Plant collectors, who often spent huge sums of money on their gardens, desired “portraits” of their prized possessions which fueled the growing popularity of flower still life painting. In the eighteenth century, painters and collectors came to appreciate floral still lifes more as highly accomplished decorate paintings that could ornament their fashionable interiors. Although Jan van Huysum was celebrated internationally during his lifetime, he nevertheless was the last of the distinguished flower still life painters active in Holland in the early eighteenth century.
Still Life with Urn of Flowers is signed and dated 1720 by Jan van Huysum. Typical of the more than two hundred and fifty known flower still lifes that van Huysum achieved during his lifetime, this garden urn of multi-seasonal blooms sits on a stone ledge before an arched niche. The flowers include peonies, primroses, morning glories, poppies, carnations, marigolds, a tulip, and a delphinium. Some of the blossoms attract insects—a white moth has lighted on the tulip stem and a fly crawls on the leaf beneath the tulip—and some droop under their own weight. A snail is seen on the broad leaf at the bottom left. The stem of a prized variegated tulip has broken and bent in half, and the overblown flower head dips down into the center of the composition. The other flowers vary as to their state of bloom: some are in early bud, some are at the perfection of maturity, and some are widely open, as if nearly spent. The terracotta garden urn, which is likely decorated with a frieze of putti, is almost totally obscured by the flowers and seems overwhelmed by the profuse bouquet it contains and which spills out of it into a roughly pyramidal shape. The peonies and other flowers at the front of the composition are bathed with a raking ray of light, while those to the back recede into the darkness of the architectural niche. This creates a diagonal pattern from the upper right to the lower left that is counterbalanced by the red poppy at the upper left and the red carnation in the polar opposite position as well as the curving of the flower stems along this diagonal line. Van Huysum favored this compositional format in his earlier flower still lives. (3) It is possible that the profuse abundance of the bouquet as well as the varied states of bloom of the flowers and the broken stem of the tulip were meant to symbolize both nature’s bounty as well as its fragility and the transience of life. (4)
The date of the Dumbarton Oaks painting, 1720, puts it at a turning point in the painting style of Jan van Huysum. Van Huysum’s earlier works, painted before approximately 1720, were composed in a traditional fashion with the lighted flower still life relieved against a darkened, indistinct background. After 1720, van Huysum switched to a more modern style, placing his flower pieces either before a landscape setting bathed in sunlight or against a lighter architectural background, thereby lightening the entire composition. This brought his painting style more in line with the developing European Rococo taste. The art critic and friend of van Huysum, Lambert ten Kate, is generally credited with having acted as the impetus for this change: “[Van Huysum] painted his flowers and fruit for many years on dark back-grounds, against which, in his opinion they came out more and were better articulated. Everyone praised these pieces as wonderful, as impossible to surpass; then our Ten Kate candidly expressed an opposite opinion. He recommended that the backgrounds be kept light, precisely in order to give the fruit and flowers in front of them a better effect. Eventually Van Huysum yielded to his friend’s repeated advice; and it was entirely due to the feeling and recommendation of Ten Kate that he completely changed his manner from then onward, and saw the value of his pieces climb as a result....” (5) The Dumbarton Oaks painting is one of the latest dated examples of van Huysum’s earlier flower still life style.
(1) See Maurice Harold Grant, Jan Van Huysum, 1682-1749 (Leigh-on-Sea, 1954).
(2) See Christopher White, The Flower Drawings of Jan van Huysum (Leigh-on-Sea, 1964).
(3) Among many paintings by Van Huysum that employ this composition, a particularly closely related example is a flower still life at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 89.503 (dated by the museum ca. 1715, 88.9 x 69.9 cm, oil on panel, signed lower right on the marble slab: Jan Van Husym fecit). The composition differs from that of the Dumbarton Oaks painting by having fewer flowers covering the body of the urn, thus revealing more of the frieze of putti. The variegated tulip with the broken stem of the Dumbarton Oaks painting is also seen in Vase de Fleurs dans une Niche, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 708 (80 x 61 cm, oil on panel, signed Jan Van Huysum Fecit), and in a chalk and watercolor drawing, Blumenstillleben – Vase vor einer halbrunden Wandnische at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, 10553 (dated by the museum ca. 1734, 40.1 x 31.6 cm, oil on panel). The composition of the drawing is particularly close to the Dumbarton Oaks painting other than that the two red flowers are oriented to the opposite corners as compared to the Dumbarton Oaks painting.
(4) For the possible symbolism of the flowers in Jan van Huysum’s paintings, see Sam Segal, The Temptations of Flora: Jan Van Huysum, 1682-1749 (Zwolle and Houston, 2007), 93-95.
(5) Roeland van Eijnden and Adriaan van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der Vaderlandsche Schilderkunst (Haarlem, 1816), vol. 1, 312-313, as translated by Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600-1720 (New Haven/London, 1995), 191.
J. Carder
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