A Basket of Flowers

Flower pieces like this were never painted from a basket standing in the room. The blooms gathered in one of them can belong to different months of the year, so the painter worked from a stock of separate studies and assembled a bouquet that could not exist. The Antwerp workshop that perfected the method was Jan Brueghel the Elder's, and in January 1625 he died in a cholera epidemic that also took three of his children. His son Jan the Younger was away in Italy at the time. He came home, took over the workshop with its clients and its patterns, and went on painting this kind of picture for another 50 years. The Metropolitan dates this basket to the 1620s, which puts it right beside that handover, on one side of it or the other.