Flower bouquet in a wooden tub

Jan Brueghel the Elder died of cholera in Antwerp in January 1625, and within a month the disease took three of his children as well. This flower piece carries that year. Brueghel was among the painters who made the flower still life its own kind of picture, and he worked in a way that sounds ordinary now but was deliberate then: he collected drawings of blooms through the seasons and assembled them into a single bouquet that could never have stood on a table at one time. Spring tulips and summer roses share the wooden tub here, gathered across months of the calendar into one impossible arrangement. Each flower is painted with the patience of a naturalist, which earned him the nickname Velvet Brueghel for the softness of his touch. His son Jan the Younger took over the workshop the same year and kept the manner going, down to the habit of tucking small insects and a few fallen petals among the flowers.