Still Life with Flowers

Between 1809 and 1811 this small panel went through three Amsterdam auctions, and each time it sold for one guilder. The sale catalogues described it as a glass bottle standing on a table, filled with fragrant flowers, by B. van Ast, and traces of an old label with that same wording still survive on the back of the panel. Van der Ast painted it around 1630. According to the Museum of Fine Arts he kept a library of more than 800 drawings of single flowers in his studio, and bouquets like this one were assembled from it. After the early auctions the picture disappears from the record until a Düsseldorf sale in 1983. Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo bought it in 1998 and gave it to the museum in 2017.