Garland of Flowers with Madonna and Child

Still-lifes became one of the important genres of paintings during the 17th century in Europe. Works that focused on flowers enjoyed great success amidst this trend, and a large number of artists in the Netherlands created images that take flowers as their subject. Many of these works represent an escape from religious subjects by artists in Holland, recently independent from the Catholic bastion of Spain. At the same time, the painters in Catholic Flanders combined this new genre with religious themes to create highly decorative religious works adorned with still-life elements. As a result, a large number of works were created in which a religious theme was surrounded by a garland of flowers. Depictions of the Madonna and Child constitute the majority of the religious elements of these works. The garlands of flowers are thought to have represented flower offerings to the Madonna and Child, at the same time that they were symbols of the admonitory theme of Vanitas. In this work the flowers were painted by Daniel Seghers while the Madonna and Child were painted by Cornelis Schut. This entrusting of the different elements to separate artists was a standard practice, and while occasionally the religious element was entrusted to a master painter such as Rubens, in general, the flowers were the central theme of the work and hence these works must be primarily considered as flower paintings.(Source: Masterpieces of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2009, cat. no. 30)