Flowers in a glass vase with metal mounted foot on a marble ledge

Dated 1675 and held in the Louvre's Department of Paintings, this flower piece showing a glass vase with a metal-mounted foot on a marble ledge is one of the finest examples of Van Aelst's late flower painting in a major public collection. The vase described — glass with metal mounting — is a luxury object that combines two demanding materials: transparent glass and reflective metal. Depicting such an object required Van Aelst to render transparency, refraction, reflection, and the structural join between the two materials, all within a single relatively small area of the composition. The Louvre acquired Dutch still lifes as part of the French royal collection and later through Revolutionary confiscations, building one of the world's great repositories of the genre. The marble ledge as compositional base was a convention Van Aelst favoured throughout his career — cooler in colour temperature than wood, more associated with permanence and classical taste than a domestic table.

The metal-mounted foot of the vase is rendered with the environmental-reflection technique used for silver: not a fixed colour, but a collection of reflections from the surrounding space, including the marble ledge below and the flowers above. The glass body of the vase is handled with transparent washes and refraction effects. The marble ledge shows cool blue-grey veining over a warm buff base, with the stone's characteristic surface sheen indicated by a faint overall glaze.