Floral Still Life

Around 1610, painting flowers on their own was still a fairly new idea. For centuries blooms had been a background detail in religious pictures, and now, in Antwerp and the Dutch towns, they were becoming the whole subject. This small panel is one of those early examples. The bouquet spills from a wicker basket beside a silver footed bowl, roses and tulips and narcissi mixed with snake's-head fritillaries and violets. No garden ever offered all of these at once, since they flower in different months, so the arrangement was assembled on the panel into a season that never existed. The tulips are worth a second look. They had reached the Netherlands from the Ottoman east only a generation earlier and were still a costly novelty, decades before the frenzy that would briefly send a single bulb to the price of a house. For a long time this picture carried another name, catalogued as the work of the German painter Peter Binoit, and Helene Kroller-Muller bought it as such. Only in recent decades have scholars returned it to Clara Peeters, an Antwerp pioneer of the still life, recognising the same wicker basket and silver bowl that appear in paintings she signed.