Bouquet of Flowers in a Glass Vase
Ambrosius Bosschaert·1621
Historical Context
Painted in 1621 and held in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, this Bouquet of Flowers in a Glass Vase is believed to be among the last works Bosschaert completed before his death the same year. The National Gallery's version is one of the finest examples of the artist's work in North America, acquired through the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. Bosschaert's career was spent almost entirely in the Dutch Republic — in Middelburg and Bergen op Zoom — yet his influence spread far beyond those provincial cities through the work of his pupils and followers, including his three sons Ambrosius the Younger, Johannes, and Abraham Bosschaert, and his brother-in-law Balthasar van der Ast. This 1621 work shows the full maturity of his approach: the glass vase is a technical tour de force, requiring the painter to render both the transparency of the material and the distortions it introduces to the stems and water visible within.
Technical Analysis
A glass vase presents Bosschaert with the challenge of painting an object defined not by its own colour but by what shows through it and what reflects off its surface. He handles this with restraint, using thin grey-blue washes for the body of the glass, bright white strokes for the highlights on the rim and curvature, and careful painting of the stems within as slightly distorted and colour-shifted by refraction and water. The flowers above are his characteristic careful assembly of species observed individually and then combined into a single impossible bouquet.
Look Closer
- ◆The glass vase walls are nearly invisible except where a highlight or reflected dark occurs — rendering the transparency of the material through the selective marking of its optical effects.
- ◆Stems inside the vase are seen through two refractive media — glass and water — and are painted accordingly as slightly bent and colour-shifted.
- ◆Each flower in the bouquet appears to have been studied individually before being composed into the group, with no two blooms sharing exactly the same degree of openness or angle.
- ◆Shells or other natural curiosities placed on the ledge beside the vase were luxury collectibles in early seventeenth-century Dutch culture, their presence elevating the still life into the domain of the Wunderkammer.
