Flower Still Life

The Mauritshuis calls this small copper plate and its companion, a fruit piece of the same size, unique in Van Huysum's work. He made his name with large, lavish bouquets in vases. Here there is no vase at all. A few flowers have been laid, with apparent carelessness, on the corner of a marble tabletop, and the eye goes straight to one large rose with fragile petals, where two butterflies are alighting. The pair already had a known owner in 1736, while Van Huysum was still alive, the collector Robert de Neufville in Leiden. Later they belonged to Hermina Jacoba, Baroness van Leyden, at Warmond, and in 1816 they were bought by the Dutch state for the royal collection that opened to the public in the Mauritshuis six years later.