Still Life with Bottles

In 1892 Floris Verster was the young man who had shaken up Dutch flower painting. A few years earlier he had startled Leiden with canvases of field flowers and weeds blown up almost to abstraction, all light and growth and decay. That same year he married and moved out to Groenoord, a country estate on the edge of Leiden, and began to pull inward. This is the mood you meet here. No exotic blooms, just a few glass bottles set on a table, caught for the way light gathers and slips across the glass. The interest is the same as in the flowers, the fall of light and the plain fact of an object sitting in a room, only the subject has quieted right down. Over the decade that followed Verster kept moving this way, toward smaller, stiller things and eventually toward crayon drawings of ordinary corners. His hometown museum in Leiden, De Lakenhal, still holds by far the largest group of his work, around 160 pieces.