Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

Jan van Huysum’s lasting fame centers on his exuberant arrangements and technical virtuosity. More than any other artist before or after, he was able to capture the dynamic energy of a profuse array of flowers and fruit. In this superb and large example, the bouquet fills the entire panel. Flowers overflowing their terra-cotta vase and peaches and grapes spilling over the foreground ledge create a sense of opulent abundance. Woven in and out of the densely packed bouquet of peonies, roses, carnations, and auriculae are the rhythmically flowing stems and blossoms of tulips, veronica, tuberoses, and hops. The artist masterfully integrated insects into his bouquet and suggested the translucence of dewdrops on petals and leaves. He often illuminated blossoms situated at the back of his bouquets and silhouetted darker foreground leaves and tendrils against them.

Van Huysum was reportedly secretive about his technique, and he apparently forbade anyone, including his own brothers, to enter his studio for fear that they would learn how he purified and applied his colors. He spent a portion of each summer in Haarlem, already a major horticultural center in his day, in order to study flowers in bloom. The remarkable similarities in the shapes and character of individual blossoms in different still-life paintings indicate, however, that he also used drawn or painted models to satisfy pictorial demands.

Trained by his father, Justus van Huysum the Elder (1659–1716), Jan derived his compositional ideas and technical prowess from the examples of Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606–1684) and Willem van Aelst (1626–1683). Following De Heem’s lead, Jan van Huysum organized his bouquets with sweeping rhythms that draw the eye in circular patterns throughout the composition and included flowers that do not bloom at the same time. Van Aelst’s work showed Van Huysum the advantages of massing brightly lit flowers in order to focus the dynamically swirling rhythms underlying his compositions.