Small Bouquet of Flowers

At the foot of this small bouquet lie coins, jewellery and rings, and beside them a few cyclamen pulled up by the roots. Set next to cut flowers that will wilt within days, they are there to recall how briefly anything mortal lasts. One of the coins carries the date 1599. It is tempting to read that as the date of the picture, but the museum places the panel around 1607 and takes the coin as a sign of when Brueghel started it, which suggests he returned to it over several years. The whole bouquet is kept to a cool range of blues, and the museum counts it among the finest flower pictures in existence. By 1747 it was in the emperor's secular treasury in Vienna, and it has hung in the picture gallery since at least 1781.