Still Life with Roses in a Glass Vase

Around 1619 Bosschaert was on the move. He had left Middelburg a few years before, joined the painters' guild in Utrecht in 1616, and by 1619 was working in Breda, in the south of the Dutch Republic. Small pictures like this one could travel with him. It is painted on copper, a sheet not much bigger than the page of a large book.

Here he narrowed the bouquet to roses, pushed into a roemer, the Dutch wine glass with little glass knobs studding its stem. The museum's own label points out the catch. Roses this heavy would be far too much for a glass that size. The detail around them is exact all the same, with dewdrops on the petals, a dragonfly and a butterfly in the air, and a caterpillar beside a lone crocus on the stone sill.

In the 19th century the painting was in a private collection in Lorraine, in eastern France. It resurfaced at a Paris auction in 1992 and reached Boston as a gift in 2019.