Pink Carnation

This 1630 watercolor study of a pink carnation at the Birmingham Museum of Art represents an unusual medium for Van der Ast, who worked primarily in oil on panel. Watercolor was used for botanical illustration and preparatory studies rather than finished cabinet paintings, suggesting this may be a study work or part of a series of flower drawings intended for collectors who valued botanical accuracy over painted illusion. Carnations — particularly pink and striped varieties — were prized ornamental flowers in the seventeenth century, associated with divine love in religious iconography and with earthly passion in secular contexts. Their tight, multi-petaled heads provided artists with complex layered forms to render. The Birmingham Museum of Art holds an important collection of European drawings and works on paper, and this watercolor enters the tradition of Dutch botanical illustration that ultimately fed into the great natural-history publications of the period. The intimacy of the medium — a single bloom, rendered with botanical precision — gives this work a different character from Van der Ast's crowded panel compositions.

Watercolor on paper requires confidence and speed that oil on panel does not — there are no glazing corrections possible once pigment sets. Van der Ast uses wet-on-wet technique for the soft petal gradations and reserves the white of the paper for highlights rather than applying lead white. The result has a luminosity distinct from panel paintings, with light seeming to emanate from within the pigment.