Large Flower Bouquet in Wooden Vase

Around 1606, when Jan Brueghel painted this, a picture of flowers and nothing else was still a new kind of painting, and the museum treats this panel as a key work in its rise. It counts about 130 different flowers here, each set down precisely enough to be named, so the bouquet works almost like an illustrated catalogue of what a collector might hope to grow. Rare bulbs were passing then between the gardens of princes and scholars all over Europe. A generation earlier the botanist Carolus Clusius, born in the southern Netherlands, had looked after the imperial gardens here in Vienna and sent new plants on to friends in the Low Countries. At nearly a metre high, the oak panel is large for Brueghel, who usually worked small. It belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, whose collection forms the core of this gallery.