Flowers, birds and various animals

Daniel Seghers was a Jesuit. He entered the order in 1614 as a lay brother, which meant he took no payment for his painting. The Antwerp Jesuits gave his flower pieces away instead, to princes, ambassadors and cardinals, and he kept a list of who had received what, well over two hundred pictures with the names attached. That was one route an Antwerp painter still had to the courts of Europe around 1630, when the Dutch held the mouth of the Scheldt shut and the city's trade with it. Seghers normally painted a garland around a stone niche and left the holy figure inside to somebody else, often Rubens or Cornelis Schut. The panel at Narbonne, which the museum gives to him, is a different thing altogether, a garden crowded with a peacock, a parrot, rabbits, ripening grapes and a snake in the grass.