PROVENANCE -

The artist’s son Jacob de Gheyn III (1596-1641).

Bequeathed to his nephew Johan Wttenbogaert.

(Possibly) Anon. Sale, Amsterdam, 27 April 1774, lot 70.

(Possibly) J.F. Wolschot; sale, Antwerp, 1 September 1817, lot 174 (described as ‘on linen pasted on wood’).

Anon. Sale, Brussels, 10 November 1923, lot 3.

With J. Goudstikker, Amsterdam, 1924.

With Leggatt Brothers, London, from whom purchased by the father of the previous owner in 1929.

THE SUBJECT -

I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn, an introduction to the study of his drawings, Amsterdam, 1936, pp. 23, 24, 32, 102, 128 and 129.

H.E. van Gelder, ‘Werken van de de Gheyns’, Mededeelingen van den dienst voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen der gemeente ‘s Gravenhage, IV, 1937, pp. 82-9.

H. Gerson, Van Geertgen tot Frans Hals, Amsterdam, 1951, pl. 138.

M.L. Hairs, Les Peintres Flamands de Fleurs au XVIIe Siècle, Paris & Brussels, 1955, pp. 92, 93, 180, note 449, and 214 (2nd ed., 1965, pp. 152, 153 and 376).

I. Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, London, 1956, pp. 45-51, fig. 40.

I. Bergström in the catalogue of the exhibition IJdelheid der IJdelheden, Leiden, 1970, [unpaginated p. VI], fig. 1.

W. Bernt, The Netherlandish Painters of the Seventeenth Century, London, 1970, I, pl. 421.

P. Mitchell, European Flower Painters, London, 1973, p. 121.

F. Hopper Boom, ‘An early flower piece by Jacques de Gheyn II’, Simiolus, 8, 1975-76, p. 195.

I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations, The Hague, Boston & London, 1983, I, pp. 112-13; II, p. 21, no. P 41; III, pl. 10.

S. Segal, Catalogue of the exhibition Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, Nabio Museum of Art, Osaka; Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo; and The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990, p. 187.

E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Luca Bild-Lexikon: Holländische Stillebenmaler im 17. Jahrhundert, Lingen, 1995, 2, p. 376, no. 135/3.

A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden, 2003, p. 89.

Jacob de Gheyn’s parents were from Utrecht but at the time of his birth were living in Antwerp where his father (of the same name) worked as a glass-painter. De Gheyn’s father was his first master but on his death in 1581 the family moved back north, and in 1585 de Gheyn went to work in the Haarlem studio of the great Mannerist artist Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). Van Mander, in his biography of de Gheyn in Het Schilder-Boeck of 1604, tells us that he spent two years in Goltzius’ studio. In any case, Goltzius left for Rome in 1590, and de Gheyn is recorded at Amsterdam from 1591 until 1595, when he married the wealthy Eva Stalpaert van der Wiele, a union which gave him financial security and connections with the aristocracy. The couple is documented in Leiden 1596-1601, where de Gheyn was in contact with the famous French botanist and from 1592 director of the university’s botanical garden Charles de l’Escluse, known as Carolus Clusius (1526-1609). By 1603 de Gheyn had settled definitively in The Hague. He is recorded in 1623 as a gentleman of considerable means, with a large collection of ancient coins and medals. The poet and future statesman Constantijn Huygens was a close enough friend to attend his deathbed.  De Gheyn was an exceptional draughtsman and in the earlier part of his career executed numerous engravings, including, during his Amsterdam period, 117 for the military manual The Exercise of Armes. These show a very successful assimilation of the lessons to be learned from Goltzius, only de Gheyn’s senior by seven years. According to Theodorus Schrevelius (1572-1649) in his chronicle of Haarlem “there was always a rivalry between the disciple and master”. De Gheyn’s marriage seems to have enabled him to relinquish printmaking more or less completely and to take up painting, a development described in detail by Van Mander. A similar shift took place in Goltzius’ career at the same time. 

De Gheyn’s relatively small œuvre in oil includes a variety of subjects, including religious (The Virgin Mary, Museo Bardini, Florence), mythological (Venus, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Neptune, Amphitrite and Cupid, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne), historical (Julius Caesar, Ham House), animals (The White Stallion offered to Prince Maurice after the Battle of Flanders, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and genre (A Master teaching a Pupil, City Art Gallery, Manchester).

An innovator in many fields, his Vanitas still life in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, dated 1603, is generally considered the earliest known vanitas still life in European painting. It is, however, de Gheyn’s flower still lifes that are regarded as his greatest achievements, as they were by such contemporaries as Balthasar Gerbier, writing in 1618, and Huygens, who wrote that de Gheyn’s talent for flower painting even surpassed that of Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625) and Ambrosius Bosschaert I (1543-1614). De Gheyn certainly has a stronger claim to have painted the earliest independent flower painting produced in the Netherlands. Botanical interest encouraged by Clusius, the import of seeds and bulbs, and greatly improved methods of cultivation have all been credited with stimulating the rapid rise in flower painting in the years around and after 1600. De Gheyn was in the vanguard of this development. The earliest known flower piece by Roelandt Savery is of 1603, the earliest by Ambrosius Bosschaert of 1607, and the first reference to a flower still life by Jan Brueghel the Elder of 1606, while a watercolour flower piece on parchment by de Gheyn of 1598 is recorded in the William Young Ottley sale in London in 1814. Van Mander tells us that “a little pot of flowers from life … very precisely executed” sold to the Amsterdam collector Hendrick van Os, was De Gheyn’s first oil “and as a first effort wondrous”, and that a second, “larger pot of flowers” was purchased in 1604 by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, along with a sketchbook of flowers. 

While the larger of the two oils has not been traced, the small volume of twenty-two watercolour studies, which actually includes a number of animals and insects, all signed and dated between 1600 and 1604, is in the Frits Lugt Collection in the Institut Néerlandais, Paris (Van Regteren Altena, nos. 909-930, pls. 172-93; Swan, op. cit., pls. II-IV; figs. 33-7). This includes a still life of A Fritillary and three Tulips in a terracotta Vase, signed and dated 1600 (Bergström, op. cit., 1956, fig. 37; Swan, op. cit., pl. II). A very small flower piece on copper derives in all its elements from these studies and is thus datable before 1604; although currently untraced, this is clearly the artist’s earliest surviving oil painting and may be that bought by Hendrick van Os (Hopper Boom, op. cit., passim, fig. 1; Van Regteren Altena, no. P 31, pl. 1; C. Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629), Cambridge, 2005, fig. 30). In 1606 de Gheyn received the extraordinary sum of six hundred guilders for a flower piece acquired by the Dutch States-General as a present for the French queen, Marie de’ Medicis, on her visit to Holland. That too is untraced, but de Gheyn’s highly individual contribution to the art of flower painting, entirely independent of Ambrosius Bosschaert and other contemporaries, is represented by three surviving signed and dated works from the years 1612-1615: 

1612. On copper, 58 x 44 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague (Bergström, op. cit., 1956, fig. 38; Van Regteren Altena, no. P 39, pl. 8; Swan, op. cit., fig. 6).

1613. On copper, 39 x 28.5 cm. De Villeneuve Collection (Bergström, op. cit., 1956, fig. 39; Van Regteren Altena, no. P 40, pl. 9; Segal, op. cit., no. 32).

1615. Our painting. Untraced since 1929, this is described by Van Regteren Altena as the largest recorded flower painting by De Gheyn (although he gives similar dimensions to an asymmetrical flower piece on canvas datable after 1620, Van Regteren Altena, no. P 42, pls. 20-2). De Gheyn’s friend Arend van Buchell, known as Arnoldus Buchelius (1565-1641) mentions in his Res pictoriae that he had on 3 April 1635 visited De Gheyn’s son, the painter Jacob de Gheyn III, and admired this flower-piece, for which a collector had in vain offered a thousand florins (see G.J. Hoogewerff and J.Q. van Regteren Altena, Arnoldus Buchelius “Res Pictoriae”, The Hague, 1926, p. 92). In his will drawn up in 1641, Jacob de Gheyn III bequeathed “… aen sijn, … neve Johan Wttenbogaert, den grooten blompot daer een tros lelien, boven uut comt, geschildert van des comparants vader za., so die staet in sijn ebbenlijst besloten in een houten casse”[the large vase of flowers surmounted by lilies, painted by the father … which is in an ebony frame and enclosed in a wooden case] (see A. Bredius, Rembrandtiana, Oud-Holland, XXXIII, 1915, p. 127; Van Regteren Altena, pp. 128-9).

Despite not having been seen since 1929, the painting’s significance as a milestone in the development of Dutch flower painting is attested by the frequent discussions of it in the context of early Dutch still life painting. In Bergström’s opinion de Gheyn’s three dated flower pieces in oil ‘are sufficient to secure for him one of the most prominent positions in Dutch still-life art’, and this is one of only five paintings given full-page black and white illustrations in his pioneering study of Dutch still-life painting of 1956.